Profiling high school students’ multimodal posting in a digital literacy SPOC and examining teachers’ and students’ perceptions

ABSTRACT

Given the changing nature of literacy, it is critical to investigate how learners communicate using the multimodal affordances of digital platforms. Guided by metafunctions of Systemic Functional Linguistics, this study developed a multimodal analytical framework to quantify multimodal composing with indicators of functional meaning to evaluate students’ multimodal literacy practices from an overall perspective. Based on a high school digital literacy SPOC (Small Private Online Course), this study adopted a mixed-method approach to profile students’ multimodal posting and examine teachers’ and students’ perceptions. The empirical findings included that: (1) Five profiles were identified based on students’ ideational, interpersonal, and textual meaning differences: academic posters, sensational posters, visual posters, all-round posters, and perfunctory posters. Academic posters viewed multimodal posting as a presentation of research findings; sensational posters viewed multimodal posting as a connection with classmates; visual posters valued the formal beauty of multimodal posts; all-round posters remixed the ideational, interpersonal, and textual functions of multimodal posting; perfunctory posters viewed multimodal posting as a have-to-do task. (2) Teachers underestimated multimodal posting’s interpersonal meaning that students valued. The SFL-based multimodal analytical framework and empirical findings provide implications for explicitly evaluating and guiding students’ multimodal composition in digital environments.

KEYWORDS:

• High school students
• multimodal posting
• digital literacy
• new literacy practices
• systemic functional linguistics
• epistemic network analysis

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Beijing Postdoctoral Research Foundation. We would also like to thank Mr. Qiang Luo (Director of Suzhou Education Quality Monitoring Center, China) and Mr. Yuanzhao Liu (Former Principal of Suzhou No. 10 High School of Jiangsu Province, China) for their invaluable contribution to the digital literacy SPOC conducted in this study. Last but not least, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments that greatly helped improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mengqian Wang

Mengqian Wang is a postdoc researcher at the College of Education, Capital Normal University. Her research interests include learning analytics, digital literacy, and teacher education. E-mail: [email protected]

Wenge Guo

Wenge Guo is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Education, Peking University. Her research interests include online education, education communication, and Chinese education policy. E-mail: [email protected]

Qian Dong

Qian Dong is a postdoc researcher at School of Education, Beijing Normal University. Her research interests include learning sciences, instructional design and physical education. E-mail: [email protected]