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Lim, Fei Victor
Preferred name
Lim, Fei Victor
Email
victor.lim@nie.edu.sg
Department
English Language & Literature (ELL)
ORCID
70 results
Now showing 1 - 10 of 70
- PublicationOpen AccessMultimodality in the English language classroom: A systematic review of literatureA number of systematic reviews on multimodal pedagogies in English language classrooms were conducted from the 1990s to early 2010s. However, there is no recent review examining the thematic issues related to multimodal pedagogies in the English language classroom. This systematic review addresses this gap by examining research articles published from 2010 to 2021 on multimodal pedagogies in the primary and secondary English language classrooms. A qualitative thematic analysis of 98 articles gathered from the search uncovered five common themes including engagement with multimodal texts from students’ lifeworld, the use of critical, creative and culturally responsive multimodal pedagogies, explicit teaching of multimodal literacy, affect in multimodal learning, and concerns over multimodal assessment. The article discusses these themes in relation to the thematic findings of existing review studies with the same focus of multimodality in the English language classroom, and proposes directions for future research.
WOS© Citations 15Scopus© Citations 46 515 325 - PublicationMetadata onlyLearning with technologies in the digital age: Now and the future
In a post-pandemic normal, digital technologies are present in the design of learning in most educational contexts. Digital learning occurs in online or blending spaces that afford teacher–student and student–student interactions. In this chapter, we advance two premises which are that technologies are no longer supporters of learning but facilitators, and teachers' pedagogies should be given priority over the technology itself. Our central argument is that this understanding of the role and place of digital technology in the design of learning is a predictor of effective teaching. The teacher, as a designer of learning, plays a crucial role in shaping students' academic growth and development. This chapter explores the ins and outs of five main areas of interest to pedagogies aided by digital technologies: designing learning, digital learning designs, digital learning with embodied teaching, digital learning interactions, and digital literacies. The effectiveness of teaching, that is, of successfully learning from different perspectives of multimodality lies at the core of these five critical fields in education. We provide an overview of the most recent approaches to these areas underpinned by robust theoretical and analytical frameworks that adopt a multimodal perspective. The chapter ends with a proposed roadmap for researchers and practitioners to jointly advance in the design of effective learning with digital technologies.
32 - PublicationOpen AccessDesigning school libraries of the future study: Report 2024(National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University (NIE NTU), Singapore., 2024)
; ; ; Pang, ElizabethIn a constantly shifting world of increasing literacy expectations, technological advancements and global flows, school libraries as learning hubs are crucial to support students’ reading and learning. Following an earlier study documenting the positive impact of well-designed and stocked school libraries on students’ reading, the research team, with the support of CPDD, MOE and the three schools in the study, embarked on a library redesign project from 2019 to 2020. An ERPF grant, DEV02-20 Designing School Libraries of the Future, awarded to the research team, allowed the team to document the redesign process and study the impact of library redesign at the three Library of the Future (LOTF) prototype schools for one full year each between 2022 and 2023.201 592 - PublicationMetadata onlyEnglish and Englishness: A multimodal analysis of English language teaching materials in contemporary ChinaThis chapter adopts multimodal content analysis (Bell, 2001; Joo et al., 2019) to examine an introductory video to an online English course, the textbook accompanying the course, as well as the online course itself, for students in China. The analysis aims to surface the discursive construction and representation of values and the expression of ideologies on English in the English language teaching (ELT) materials (Hu & Mckay, 2014). In particular, the analysis highlights the privileging of Anglocentric representations and dominance of the native speaker model (Kirkpatrick, 2007). Such representations are observed to persist in the Chinese society despite the present status of English as a world language with an increasing number of English language speakers from many parts of the world in the outer circle (Kachru, 1992). Through the analysis, we discuss the expressions of cultural hegemony (Gramsci, 1971), in this case, the western cultural bias implicit in ELT materials propagated to students in China. We advance the argument that such ideological positioning (van Dijk, 2011) of ELT materials is unproductive as such an essentialist definition of EL proficiency is unattainable for non-native speakers (Kirkpatrick, 2007). Even worse, such an association between the English language and nationality can be deleterious as it propagates the unhelpful notion of English where standards and norms are determined by nationality rather than by use.
103 - PublicationMetadata onlyThe future of TESOL with multimodalityThe future of TESOL must engage critically with the multimodal turn, acknowledging the shifting landscape of communication in a digital age where meaning-making extends beyond linguistic forms to encompass a range of semiotic resources, such as images, gestures, sounds, and spatial designs. This paper argues for a twofold agenda: augmenting English language learning with multimodality and broadening the scope of literacy education to include multimodal literacy. This involves leveraging multimodal resources not merely as supplementary tools but as integral components of language instruction, thereby enriching learners’ communicative competence in authentic and diverse contexts. The paper calls for a strategic and systemic response from the TESOL community, advocating for research-informed pedagogies, policy frameworks that recognize the importance of multimodal literacy, and targeted professional development for teachers.
10 - PublicationOpen AccessUnderstanding the role of caregiver-child pedagogical questioning in Singaporean children’s school readiness and achievement(National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University (NIE NTU), Singapore, 2024)
; ; ; 66 242 - PublicationMetadata onlyDesign considerations for digital learning during the COVID-19 pandemic: Losses and gainsThe COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the value of digital technology – in preserving work, play and learning – at a time when physical interactions are constrained. Given the challenges involved in the sudden conscription towards digital teaching and learning, the reception of both teachers and students towards the adoption of digital technologies for home-based teaching and learning has been mixed. While appreciating the affordances of digital technologies in supporting the continuity of teaching during the lockdowns, concerns have been raised by teachers on the effectiveness of digital learning. Our chapter discusses the teacher’s use of semiotic technologies to design learning experiences for students. From the perspective of design considerations, we explore the different ways of meaning making in digital learning – in particular, how knowledge can be represented, pedagogic relations expressed and learning organised through the affordances of semiotic technologies. We do this by studying three types of semiotic technologies, namely, the ubiquitous video lectures, digital games for learning and social media, specifically in its appropriation as a learning platform. Our chapter concludes by reflecting on losses and gains in digital learning and the need for teachers to expand their pedagogical repertoire in the post-pandemic education normal.
60 - PublicationOpen AccessDesign-based research approach for teacher learning: A case study from SingaporeIn this article, we describe how a design-based research approach brought about teacher learning in terms of both confidence and competence to design and enact a multiliteracies lesson package. This study is situated within the efforts to grow a community of practice comprising teacher champions across schools as they work closely with researchers. Based on a single case study of a teacher, the article discusses her discernible trajectory of growth as evident from her reflections collected after each of the lesson co-design sessions, the lesson plans that she designed, and her actual classroom practices. The findings from the study suggest that the design-based research approach, given its features, can be productive in bringing about a deeper and more reflective teacher learning and as a platform to strengthen the nexus between research and practice.
WOS© Citations 6Scopus© Citations 14 274 193 - PublicationMetadata onlyApplying multimodal analysis: Embodied teaching and textbook analysis
This chapter builds on Chapter 4 and introduces two main applications within applied linguistics stemming from a systemic-functional semiotic theory of multimodality: embodied teaching and language textbook analysis. The chapter first gives a brief overview of the broader field of research that each of these applications is located in. Then each focal area is elaborated and illustrated via a case study conducted by the authors. Each case study provides a rationale for why multimodal analysis is appropriate given the research focus and questions, demonstrates how multimodal analysis was implemented and conducted, and reflects on the challenges of its implementation in applied linguistic research contexts.
25 - PublicationMetadata onlyDesign in Gunther Kress's social semioticsGunther Kress’s multimodal and social semiotic theory of communication has moved beyond the realm of linguistics, which originally framed his work, and has reached out to inform other fields, such as those of education, museum studies, as well as the humanities and social sciences more broadly. This article brings together our insights in relation to a concept from Gunther Kress’s theory, that of design. Drawing from our research, we reflect on Kress’s conceptualisation of design in social semiotics and discuss how this idea has inspired us to advance research across the domains of formal learning in schools, informal learning and communication in museums, and in everyday communication and social interaction. We consider that the contribution of design is to challenge the boundaries of concepts such as ‘competence’, ‘interpretation’ and ‘critique’, associated respectively with the dominant discourses and practices in the worlds of education, museums and everyday communication and research practice. We look at design as: (1) learning; (2) transformation of resources; and (3) an engaged and engaging social semiotic research, and argue that as an interpretative resource it enables us to move beyond the limitations posed by institutions such as schools, museums and academia.
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