Lim, Fei Victor

With increased access to technologies for reading, more understanding is needed about how adolescents engage with print and digital reading across school and out-of-school contexts. In this study, mobile ethnography was used to document the everyday print and digital reading practices of adolescent girls from one all-girls’ school. They responded to real-time researcher prompts about their reading across various timings, locations, and devices over four days, and participated in photo-elicitation interviews. Findings showed that as students moved between locations, they also transited across devices, platforms, and formats, making use of different print and digital resources for varied ways of reading. Their ability to ‘style-shift’ flexibly across the boundaries of school and personal spaces, various devices and platforms allowed them to independently optimise reading as a resource for their everyday leisure, information seeking, and learning purposes. Insights, implications, and challenges for learning in a post-pandemic digital age are discussed.

A challenge for researchers working with multimodal classroom discourse is to be able to describe and discuss the interaction and interplay across various semiotic resources. This article adopts the Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis approach to examine the relationship between language and gesture used by the teacher, in interaction with the students, and the emergent meanings made multimodally. It discusses the mechanisms by which language and gesture combine to make meaning by extending concepts originally developed for language–image relations. From the analysis and interpretation of the teachers’ multimodal selections in the lesson, the emergent meaning of ‘structured informality’ is proposed. Structured informality offers a way to consider how a teacher can design an effective learning experience for their students using multimodal resources.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown measures in many countries have increased young people's engagement with digital media. The digital divide goes beyond just having devices and includes differences in how well young people can use digital technology. In this paper, we shift our attention beyond screen time to the nature of the adolescents' digital media use. Our study looks at two adolescents from different backgrounds to understand how their digital media experiences differ in viewing, play, and reading. We add to the literature on the influence SES has on the ways in which adolescents are using digital media during the COVID-19 pandemic in Singapore. Our study was conducted during the pandemic and participants were selected using convenience stratified sampling and the snowballing method. Our findings show that the adolescents' digital viewing was motivated by the need to be a part of an affinity group and that while the viewing was passive, it served a social function to develop a sense of connectedness with peers. We also found that adolescents from high socioeconomic backgrounds tended to engage in more digital reading compared to their peers from low socioeconomic backgrounds. In addition, while the adolescents' digital play was shaped by their socioeconomic realities, they were able to make the most from their circumstances and demonstrated both creativity and savviness. By demonstrating the disparities in digital media experiences between two adolescents from contrastive socioeconomic backgrounds, we shed light on the implications of the digital divide, where both equitable access to digital resources and the development of digital literacies necessary to navigate the digital landscape is currently lacking. We argue for the importance for researchers and policymakers to move beyond acknowledging long-standing concerns and take actionable steps to address these issues.

The 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.

YouTubers focusing on college-related content have gained traction in recent years. This study explores the ways College YouTubers establish their personal branding online using a social semiotic perspective. Focusing on how two YouTubers of different cultural backgrounds, from the United States and Singapore, document their first day of college amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, a multimodal discourse analysis is carried out on the two videos to identify the prominent modes utilised to make meaning. We analyse the multimodal discourse of the videos of the College YouTubers and discuss the impression management strategies the online content creators adopted from the dramaturgical perspective. Our study seeks to contribute towards understanding how online content creators engage in digital labour and present themselves successfully in self-commodification through personal branding.

Against the current backdrop of the controversies and concerns over machine scoring, this paper focuses on one specific, less controversial, aspect of how machine can be effective in improving students’ writing, that is in identifying and providing timely feedback on language accuracy to students. This paper investigates the use of a Linguistic Feedback Tool (LiFT) to identify and provide feedback of the use of grammar, spelling, and punctuation in students’ composition as well as the potential reduction in the teacher’s marking time through a study conducted in Singapore schools. Part One of the study explores the teachers and students’ reception as well as the students’ experience of using a LiFT in their compositions. Part Two of the study investigates the hypothesis that the students’ use of a LiFT to review composition drafts before submission to the teachers would reduce the teachers’ marking time. The findings indicate that both teachers and students are receptive to the use of a LiFT to improve students’ English composition and that there are time-saving from marking for the teachers.

Cultivating teachers to be active and agentic learners is crucial for contemporary teacher education (Lipponen & Kumpulainen, 2011). Those teachers’ qualities are essential in preparing students’ future readiness in an increasingly complex world (P21 Framework Definitions, 2015). In fact, both learning principles and evidence from practice inform us that purposeful collaboration in networked learning communities (NLCs) encourage teacher agency to learn (Lieberman & Wood, 2003; Muijs, West & Ainscow, 2010). As a complement to the literature, we are interested in the development of social relationships among teachers, which enables and facilitates their learning. We propose “laterality” – the relations and networks among peers (e.g., teachers) as an important concept to characterize NLCs.
Studies on laterality, which have shown to support teacher learning, are usually found in the decentralized systems where individuals are the best entities to form these networks to support each other’s growth (Hargreaves & Goodman, 2006; Muijs et al., 2010). Thus, developing laterality from the bottom-up becomes natural in the decentralized contexts (Granovetter, 1973). Despite considerable theoretical promise of laterality and its increasing prevalence in practice, we wonder whether teacher laterality matters in the centralized education systems, and if it does, how it grows.

WiREAD+ is a web-based collaborative critical reading and learning analytics environment to scaffold learning and motivate students to develop richer dialogue and quality interactions with peers around multimodal texts. This paper reports on the pilots to scale up the use of WiREAD+ beyond the original context of Secondary School English Language (EL) learning to three distinct educational settings, namely, EL in a primary school, English Literature in a junior college (pre-university), and a tertiary-level Discourse Studies course. We report on learners’ perceptions in response to the use of the system and reflect on the potential and challenges in scaling up the system across different educational contexts, specifically on the three augmentations to the system which we have designed to improve its scalability readiness. Drawing from the findings of the pilot studies, we briefly discuss how we can support the wider adoption and deployment of the system across schools and settings.