Past Seminars

In many L2 writing classrooms, teachers spend a massive amount of time responding to student writing. A large number of them adopt conventional feedback practices, marking student writing laboriously with much attention paid to errors, and dominating the feedback process without sharing responsibility with students. Despite the time and energy spent on written feedback, teachers themselves often feel that their efforts do not pay off as students continue to exhibit the same problems in writing. What’s worse, students lose motivation and confidence in writing and remain passive in the writing classroom. In this talk, I examine the “why”, “what” and “how” of feedback In L2 writing classrooms, and discuss how feedback can be used to motivate students and empower them to take greater responsibility for learning in writing. I also explore how technological and AI tools can be leveraged to maximize student engagement during the feedback process.

Registration Link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfyBBVV5FefRbtJK8BB6lqk2261RSYQGdOz_gBJzj-aSKeeCw/viewform?usp=sf_link

Time: 12:30-14:00, 24 May, 2024

Agenda:

Talk 1: Designing learning with multimodality, Victor Lim

Talk 2: Designing assessment with multimodality, George Jiang

Discussion: Yuen Yi Lo

Registration Link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdtpI-jwNeEJUjqFzbOOBo2QUguzwh19sA8Ynxczfh_LKs2TQ/viewform?usp=sf_link

Talk 1: Designing Learning with Multimodality (by Prof. Fei Victor Lim)

This talk reflects on the applications of multimodality on learning and maps the terrain by introducing three dimensions – multimodality for learning, multimodality as learning and multimodality in learning. Multimodality for learning involves the use of multimodal resources to support language and subject content learning, in recognition of the multimodal nature of disciplinary knowledge representations. Multimodality as learning extends literacy beyond language, with a focus on multimodal meaning-making in the development of students’ multimodal literacy skills as well as assessing students’ multimodal literacy and evaluating their artefacts. Multimodality in learning focuses on teachers’ orchestration of multimodal resources in the classroom as embodied teaching. It also includes studies on the multimodal critical discourse analysis of classroom resources as well as the use of multimodal learning analytics and artificial intelligence for analysing students’ signs of learning and measuring engagement in the learning process. I will discuss the areas for potential research to advance the field in relation to the three dimensions of multimodality and learning.

Talk 2: Designing Assessment with Multimodality (by Prof. Lianjiang Jiang)

Despite the increasing popularity of translanguaging as an instructional strategy and the ascending linguistic and cultural diversity in CLIL classrooms, content assessment remains monolingual and monomodally carried out in written language. There is a critical need to explore how translanguaging assessment can be designed and enacted through assessment innovations. This talk explores innovative use of digital multimodal composing (DMC) as translanguaging assessment in CLIL classrooms and the pertinent practical issues of validity, reliability, and manageability associated with such innovation.

For decades, institutions, businesses, and individuals have engaged in discourse regarding their commitment to building a better world. In 2024, however, we are still a long way from achieving sustainable development. This new rhetoric is the result of corporate peer pressure, increased activism and consumer engagement on social media, and growing risks for reputational damage and financial impacts on corporations. Among all business sectors, luxury has historically been associated with qualities such as overconsumption and social stratification that do not naturally align with sustainability (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2017; Veblen, 1957), however, it has been integrating Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors into corporate discourse. This study is concerned with the semiotic construction of meanings related to the renegotiation of the oxymoronic concept of ‘sustainable luxury’ (Wells et al. 2021). This study adopts a social semiotic approach to analyse Instagram posts shared by luxury brands in 2019, 2020 and 2021 (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Nervino, 2018). The analysis shows how the discourse shared on Instagram constructs environmental, social, and governance claims by deploying a diversified set of semiotic resources enacting both conceptual and narrative processes, intertextual references, cohesive devices such as colour and medium-specific features to articulate a call for collective action and play the role of a catalyst for certain causes. This study is part of an overarching project which investigates sustainable corporate discourse and highlights how discourse enables individuals, public and private entities to advocate, influence, and drive change in the society. Among the outcome from this project, digital multimodal composing of sustainability discourse has been integrated into relevant courses and a new course ‘The Language of Sustainability’ has been developed and will launch next academic year.

Registration Link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfltl1mELS0FVmanOy_WLyjLFBoYT7NFHTogm7Yk8yRYIBnOg/viewform?usp=sf_link

The value of using videos in language teaching is well documented. Yet language teachers‘ instructional use of videos remains undertheorized. Given that contemporary language learners are increasingly exposed to videos and that language teachers play a critical role in actualizing the benefits of videos for learners, there is a critical need to understand the nature of video use in language classrooms. In this talk, I will present a social semiotic examination of video use in language teaching and call for developing language teachers’ multimodal awareness and social semiotic competences for more productive use of videos in language and literacy education.