Harnessing multimodal literacy for knowledge dissemination in ESP settings

Ongoing progress in digital technology continues to have a growing impact in all areas of life and the field of language teaching is no exception. With particular reference to ESP, it is now crucially important to incorporate multimodal digital resources in the classroom that can be leveraged to help learners construct knowledge in specialized discourse domains and exploit the interplay of verbal and non-verbal meanings for a deeper understanding. Towards this goal, researchers at the University of Pisa have compiled a multimodal corpus of video clips representing disciplinary areas of particular interest to ESP students (i.e., business/economics, political science, law, medicine, tourism), as well as a variety of web-mediated genres that can be adapted for classroom use, including OpenCourseWare lectures, TED Talks, and digitally available films, television series, documentaries, interviews, and docu-tours. This contribution provides an overview of the methodological issues involved in designing, collecting, and analysing a multimodal corpus to be exploited by linguists and practitioners working in ESP in higher education.