Special Issue: Multimodal Perspectives on English Language Teaching in Higher Education

In educational contexts, multimodal literacy is now a widely established concept that refers to the ability to construct meanings from texts that integrate different semiotic resources. It has also become highly relevant for language teaching thanks to an increasing awareness that the multimodal approach can help students learn to exploit semiotic modes beyond verbal language (e.g., visual, gestural, spatial) to both understand and produce texts in the target language more effectively. Linguists and practitioners working in the field of English language teaching are now called upon to find ways to adapt and integrate multimodal and multimedia resources for classroom materials and activities, representing an ongoing challenge in light of the ever-growing influence of multisemiotic digital input in the lives of learners, also outside the classroom. The aim of this special issue is to advance the current state of research-based knowledge about how multimodal and multimedia resources can be leveraged to enhance multimodal communication practices in English language teaching in higher education, and to suggest some practical classroom applications. Thus, the contributions to the special issue address both research and practice involving communication processes between language teachers and learners that are mediated through multimodal methods and materials, frameworks for teaching multimodal competence, assessment of learning based on multimodal input, assessment of student performance in multimodal tasks, and attitudes towards teaching/learning non-verbal communication in the English language classroom.