Meaning-Making, Multimodal Representation, and Transformative Pedagogy: An Exploration of Meaning Construction Instructional Practices in an ESL High School Classroom

TLDR

The study explores how high‑school ESL learners and their teacher jointly construct word meanings through multimodal representation and the sociopolitical realities of learners’ lives during simultaneous learning activities. Thirty‑three Advanced ESL students were taught with a political text, photographs, and a campaign video, engaging in meaning‑guessing, advertisement, and cartoon‑strip activities that negotiated vocabulary meanings in group and whole‑class settings. Analysis of students’ scripts revealed that multimodal resources were used to convey identity and subjectivity, prompting the authors to recommend a meaning‑making framework that links learners to sociocontextual contexts, critiques power relations, and emphasizes transformation.

Abstract

This study was an exploration of how high school language learners and their teacher jointly constructed word meanings through multimodal representation and the sociopolitical reality of learners' lives as mediating factors in the context of simultaneous multiple learning activities. Thirty-three high school Advanced ESL 3 students were taught using a political text, photographs, and a campaign video clip. Using a variety of learning activities—meaning guessing, campaign advertisement, and cartoon strips; group and whole-class activities—learners negotiated meanings of selected vocabulary items and phrases in the text. A close analysis of the students' scripts revealed that they used multimodal resources as a tool to convey their identity/subjectivity in meaning-making engagements. I recommend a meaning-making theoretical framework and classroom practices that link English language learners with the sociocontextual frame of learning, critique and challenge social power relations between migrant English learners and the broader society, and emphasize transformation as the goal of pedagogical processes in the classroom.