Resumen de Digital multimodal composing in the teaching of English for business communication: A genre-based analysis of student-authored videos
Digital technologies have transformed the design, production, and dissemination of business discourses, resulting in new modes and conventions of communication in various contexts (Du-Babcock, 2006; Bhatia & Bremner, 2012). Business practitioners have been relying on various digital platforms for communication, such as instant messaging, virtual team collaboration, and digital promotional campaigns (e.g., Aritz et al., 2018; Darics, 2015). More recently, social media, with their multimodal meaning-making and interactional affordances, have exerted revolutionary impacts on business discursive practices (Darics, 2015). These changes call for multimodal shifts in the teaching and learning of English for business communication (EBC), which is one of the most taught and investigated sub-branches of English for specific purposes (ESP), especially in second language (L2) contexts (Brumberger, 2005; Darics, 2015; Alyousef, 2016). However, despite the growing interest in developing and promoting multimodal literacy for L2 learners, little attention has been devoted to learners’ multimodal communicative competence in EBC (e.g., Planken & Kreps, 2006; Toth, 2013). In this study, the term multimodal communicative competence refers to the competence of realising designated communicative purposes in business contexts through digitally mediated communication by employing text, sound, image, and other modes (Hafner, 2014). Researchers have investigated how students perform in their digital multimodal composing tasks, such as PowerPoint slides, multimodal posters, and video assignments, by utilising resources of various modes (e.g., Hafner, 2014; Jiang, 2018). For studies on digital multimodal composing in L2 pedagogy, especially those based on video assignments authored by students (referred to as student-authored video reports in this study), the focus has been on the narratives of digital storytelling (e.g., Nelson, 2006; Yang, 2012). In EBC pedagogical contexts, however, the use of digital multimodal composing has received scant attention.
