Abstract:

The gap between the kinds of texts students usually read or write outside the school and the kinds of texts they typically read or write at school has been reported by numerous researchers. In the classroom, the students are still usually directed to traditional textbooks, and print-based texts and digital technology they frequently and effectively use in their outside-the-school life is often forgotten, ignored, or even banned. The impact of the problem intensifies in the context of foreign language education. The paper presents the results of the research conducted in 2022 as a pilot phase of the project KEGA 019TTU-4/2021 “Introducing new digital tools into teaching and research within transdisciplinary philological study programmes“ funded by the Slovak Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport. The objective of the pilot phase was to analyse the skills of first-year teacher trainees (future teachers of English as a foreign language) to create digital multimodal compositions that are attractive and communicatively effective for a defined audience with accuracy and purpose. 63 students´ digital multimodal compositions (projects) have been analysed.

The analytical categories were defined as follows:
a) the number of integrated modes of communication,
b) digital tools used,
c) logical structure,
d) accuracy,
e) correspondence with the purpose and
f) ethical aspects.

The results proved that most students opted for a limited range of formats (mostly ppt presentations and slide shows) and modes (written texts + visuals + oral comments) and manifested a low level of innovation and imagination. Projects diverting from a typical format of an academic oral presentation were sporadic.

The research results led to the following implications for future practice:
1) Creating digital multimodal compositions should become a common practice in as many elements (courses) of foreign language teacher training as possible.
2) Teacher trainers should instruct their students to create a broader range of digital multimodal compositions, including multimodal posters, graphic books, podcasts, blogs, web pages, brochures, digital stories, interactive stories, animations, and films.
3) Students need to learn how to combine different modes of communicating across the whole composition, as well as how multiple modes work together in different ways to convey the information to be communicated.
4) Students need to be better informed about various digital tools available for educational purposes.

Keywords:

CALL, higher education, digital multimodal compositions, teacher training, foreign language education.