Abstract:

Drawing from socio-constructivism, Universal Design for Learning and multiliteracies framework, this paper encourages language teachers to weave the four digital practices of communication, collaboration, and creativity into academic writing instruction. This, the researcher feels, can address two problems that perturb most ESL teachers: the disconnect of writing as a skill as taught in ESL instruction context with real world writing requirements; and the inability to ensure meaningful and productive participation of all students due to the assorted student profile in any classroom.

Transforming academic writing instruction poses a ‘wicked’ or ill-structured problem – how do we make our writing classes relevant to the current context and meaningful to all learners? What writing can teachers teach when learner levels are varied, tools for writing keep constantly changing, and real-world writing requirements are in flux?

Drawing insights from a multimedia academic writing course, this paper proposes how disruptive technologies, in this context web 2.0 tools, were used to facilitate development of digital literacy skills in students, specifically,
(1) to gather and synthesise ideas/ information
(2) to collaborate with others to enhance and structure one’s understanding, and
(3) to produce written communication augmented with multimedia aids.

Web 2.0 tools were used at two points – for conducting collaborative pre-writing activities and for creating the final individual writing task. It was observed that the digitally-mediated collaborative pre-writing activities helped students develop a better understanding of readership and engage in dialogues with themselves, peers, and others. These dialogues also tapped the potential of distributed cognition and reduced the occurrence of assumptions and fallacies through cooperation, participation and reciprocity. That dialogues support learning is not new. What this paper discusses is how dialogues with self or others become richer when accompanied by pictures. In this course, the dialogues plus pictures activities served a dual purpose: they helped students express themselves in an organic manner and also had the potential to make students question and/or alter their deep-seated beliefs and express willingness to receive new ideas.

The final task was writing an essay that incorporated multimedia elements with the verbal while adhering to the conventions of an argumentative essay. Students were allowed a choice of several web 2.0 tools to create their essays. It was observed that the multimedia essays produced by the students evidenced clarity of purpose, clear structure, and logic in argumentation. They also indicated presence of new knowledge.

The paper proposes modification of traditional writing assignments and incorporation of multimodal compositions into the writing classroom.

Keywords:

Multimodal writing, digital literacy, ESL classrooms, socio-constructivism, Universal Design for Learning.