Professionals’ feedback on emerging multimodal needs in LSP: An evaluation of student-produced instructional video tutorials

Overview & Synopsis

Increasingly, higher education students’ pedagogical needs in LSP have moved beyond school-based literacy with a focus on writing instruction in a foreign language, toward a drive to harness the multiliteracies skills more appropriate to current workplace environments. To become competent contributors in their workplace cultures, students today need to develop “language-techno cultural competence” (Sauro & Chappelle, 2017). Consequently, a greater appreciation for multiliteracies and emphasis on “a combination of one or more elements of digital, multimodal, communicative and multilingual practices” (Ware, 2017:267) should be increasingly reflected in how we teach foreign languages (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015). This study examines the extent to which students from a Master’s program in technical communication are prepared, through a multimodal design project in an English-language medium context, to meet professional workplace needs related to language fluency and multimodal literacies. It proposes a methodology for evaluating workplace multimodal literacy through i) the elaboration of an evaluation grid based on published empirical literature and ii) its employment in a guided reception study to gauge the effectiveness of student-created instructional video tutorials with four video communication professionals. The research-based criteria allowed the experts to give specific feedback on the difficulties students encountered in modally repurposing resources and adapting them across modes. We discuss three of the semiotic modes for which the experts considered students did not meet expected professional standards: organization and structuring of information included in the tutorial, the video tutorial’s speed and tempo, and spoken language narration. Our paper offers a reflection on how a collaborative needs-based analysis between academics and domain professionals can guide best practices for constructing viable evaluation grids. It suggests possibilities for introducing appropriate forms of action and intervention into future versions of teaching multimodal design projects in order to better prepare LSP students to meet workplace multimodal literacy requirements.