Abstract:

Nowadays the need of implementing new technologies and innovative practices in the educational process of teaching and learning foreign languages with an aim to increase students’ motivation and develop their communicative skills has become essential. Given that, the authors of this paper have made an attempt to introduce multimodal texts as a key tool to improve school students’ vocabulary that may allow developing their ability of thinking creatively and speaking fluently which, in their turn, can lead to students’ engagement in the English language classroom activities. In this paper, the notion ‘multimodal text’ was defined, based on the scientific literature review related to the topic, a classification of multimodal texts was introduced on the basis of the content analysis of the pedagogical literature, and a set of criteria for selecting multimodal texts was offered. The authors theoretically justify the importance of introducing multimodal texts as a tool of forming and developing school students’ vocabulary skills, into the language learning process. It is recognized that the usage of multimodal texts provides data in a concise manner, simplifies text interpretation due to their being universally applicable, and intensifies learning processes.

The research methods used in this study were the analysis and systematization of theoretical sources, and a pedagogical experiment. The aim of the study was to develop and experimentally test the methodology of using multimodal texts in the English language classroom to form school students’ communicative skills. 38 students from two Kazan schools ranked among 100 best educational institutions of Russia volunteered to participate in the pedagogical experiment. To conduct the above experiment, a set of exercises with the designed multimodal texts was compiled. The five modes of multimodal texts, namely linguistic, visual, gestural, spatial, and aural, in different proportions were offered. All the materials and tasks, thoroughly selected, were targeted at enriching students’ vocabulary which eventually ensured forming and developing students’ communicative skills. The findings validated the authors’ hypothesis that multimodal texts can significantly influence the students’ communicative and creative thinking skills. This study may be addressed to school English language teachers.

Keywords:

Communicative skills, creative thinking, criteria for selecting multimodal texts, EFL class, multimodal texts, multimodal texts classification, school students.