A Social Semiotic Analysis of EFL Students’ Multimodal Composing: The Use of Modes, Remaking of Signs, and Semiotic Awareness

Abstract

In a word full of multimodal communication, Contemporary communication rarely relies solely on spoken or written form of language, but is increasingly made with multiple modes, e.g. writing, audio, and image. This prompts a call for educators to rethink literacy in language classrooms. Despite a growing interest in multimodality in L2 contexts, the investigation of students’ multimodal composing and semiotic awareness remains underexplored, particularly in the Thai EFL context. This study examines multimodal composing activities of Thai university students in one EFL classroom, drawing on multimodal social semiotics (Bezemer and Kress, 2016) and multiliteracies (Cope and Kalantzis, 2009), to understand three aspects: the multimodal design of the students’ produced texts, the remaking of signs, and their semiotic awareness while composing multimodally. The students’ multimodal texts produced as part of an L2 multimodal composing project—short summaries, digital posters, and oral presentations of their innovative product—were analysed using social semiotics to gain insights into the first two aspects. Background questionnaires, recordings of planning and composing processes, and interview responses were collected to understand the context and reasons for their semiotic choices, enriching the social semiotic analysis. The recordings and interviews were also deductively and inductively analysed to explore emerging semiotic awareness. The analysis of two focal cases reveals that Thai EFL students were able to produce expressive multimodal texts, and multimodal composing fostered their semiotic awareness even without any training on multimodal meaning-making. However, material, contextual, and social factors were found to crucially shape the students’ semiotic choices, the meaning represented in the texts, and the extent of their semiotic awareness. The findings underscore the need to recognise the critical roles of diverse representational modes, influencing factors, and semiotic awareness for more powerful and accurate communication. The study presents a conceptualisation of the complexity of L2 multimodal composing and offers pedagogical implications to enhance language learners’ semiotic repertoire and awareness to meet the evolving communicative demands of the world.