Multimodal, Digital Artefacts as Learning Tools in a University Subject-Specific English Language Course

Abstract

This paper explores the practice of using multimodal, digital assessment tasks assigned to students of an English for Architects and Civil Engineers course at a university in Germany. Students were tasked with creating multimodal video compositions and interviewed about the processes behind composing their artefacts. The goal was to interrogate to what extent multimodal assessment tasks such as these can promote the communication of technical concepts, facilitate nuanced opportunities for language development and develop the students as social agents. The artefacts were examined through the lens of Systemic Functional Semiotics, drawing particularly upon the Genre and Multimodality framework (Bateman et al., 2017; Bateman & Schmidt-Borcherding, 2018) and a recent approach to analysing multimodal artefacts developed by Turney & Jones (2021).