Bringing plurilingual strategies into linguistically diverse classrooms: Affordances of digital multimodal composing

Abstract

It has been widely recognised that plurilingual pedagogy offers many benefits both for language learning and learning in general. However, in contexts where the linguistic profile of students is diverse, it can still be challenging for teachers to view working with the language resources of their students as feasible. In this article, we discuss how engaging students in digital multimodal composing (DMC) can support teachers’ uptake of plurilingual pedagogy. We draw on data collected from a design-based qualitative study that investigated the implementation of plurilingual pedagogy in primary classrooms in Australia. In this study, teachers engaged in professional learning on plurilingual strategies alongside digital multimodal composing. The study identified a number of affordances of digital multimodal composing that were particularly beneficial for inclusion of students’ varying knowledge of language. They included (1) an aural mode of meaning-making, (2) a playful composing process and (3) a flexible interplay of languages and modes in digital texts. The article concludes by discussing approaches to the use of digital multimodal composing for plurilingual strategies in linguistically diverse settings.

Keywords:

• Digital multimodal composing (DMC)
• plurilingual pedagogy
• home languages

Introduction

The benefits of leveraging students’ home language practices for their learning in dominant-language (English) classrooms have been documented for decades (e.g. Cummins and Swain 1986; Lucas and Katz 1994; Moll et al. 1992; Schecter and Cummins 2003). A focus on the incorporation of students’ existing linguistic resources into teaching and learning has been further reinforced by increasing scholarly attention to a holistic focus on language. The linguistic repertoire individuals use to communicate is the point of departure. Plurilingualism, as a term for an individual’s linguistic repertoire (Moore 2006), has received institutional endorsement from the Council of Europe (2018), which recognises (1) the interconnection of languages at an individual level, (2) the contribution of all linguistic knowledge and experience in the development of communicative competence, and (3) a goal of context-sensitive communication, as opposed to an idealised form of balanced ‘mastery’ of different languages. Plurilingual awareness and strategies are now also described in the Victorian Curriculum F-10 English as an Additional Language (EAL) in the Australian state of Victoria (VCAA, 2020), the context of this article.

There are many different kinds of teaching and learning strategies that fall within the scope of plurilingual pedagogy. These include identity texts (Cummins and Early 2011; Dagenais and Jacquet 2008; D’warte 2014), linking learning to prior knowledge of languages (e.g. Behan, Turnbull, and Spek 1997; Luk and Lin 2015), identity affirmation and working with a great range of meaning-making resources (French 2016; Ollerhead, 2018; Pacheco 2018; Turner 2019). However, despite the potential for plurilingual pedagogy and policy calls, incorporation of students’ extended linguistic repertoire in teaching and learning remains challenging. One challenge is a highly diverse linguistic student profile. For example, in Victoria, approximately 34% of students in government schools interact in a home language other than English (Department of Education and Training, Victoria, 2021). As Rowe (2019) argues, bilingual/multilingual students are not ‘a monolithic group’ (p. 11). They can have a great range of linguistic knowledge, and knowledge associated with home language literacy practices in particular can vary greatly (Turner, Keary and Tour 2022). Our objective is to discuss data drawn from a larger research project that sought to help address this challenge through the use of digital multimodal composing (DMC) in primary schools with a linguistically diverse student profile in the state of Victoria.

As researchers and teacher educators, we understood that an explicit focus on DMC could assist in supporting teachers’ uptake of plurilingual pedagogy. The main practical benefits we saw were (1) the inclusion of an aural mode as a useful tool for students who were not confident with print-based literacy practices, and (2) the potential for positive engagement in a creative process. We were interested in how eight primary teachers in five primary school settings in Victoria took up, adapted and extended knowledge and strategies from a 2-day (non-consecutive) professional learning programme we delivered that addressed these two practical benefits. The research question relevant to our discussion is:

• How do primary teachers interpret and adapt professional learning on digital multimodal composing in order to bring plurilingual strategies into their linguistically diverse classrooms?

Exploring this question provided insights into the ways in which digital multimodal composing could support the uptake of plurilingual strategies in linguistically diverse classrooms.

Digital multimodal composing

The concept of DMC¹ which we use in this research draws on multiliteracies as conceptualised by the New London Group (1996). This theory emerged in response to the changing nature of literacy practices due to the increased multicultural diversity and the spread of digital technologies observed in the early 90s. Within this theory, significant attention was given to how digital technologies have altered the nature of texts by making them increasingly multimodal and, thus, requiring new meaning-making practices (Cope and Kalantzis 2015; Mills, 2016). DMC emerged as one such practice and it has become very popular amongst writers across different age groups and language backgrounds (Shin et al. 2021).

Digital multimodal composing is a literacy practice which involves the production of a text comprising linguistic and non-linguistic meaning-making resources, or ‘modes’ (Jiang 2017; Yi, Shin, and Cimasko 2020). Five modes of meaning-making are commonly identified: linguistic, visual, audio, gestural and spatial (New London Group 1996). The notion of ‘orchestration’ (Hafner and Ho 2020, p. 2) helps to guide composition of multimodal texts. As Hafner and Ho (2020) argue, ‘texts are referred to as ‘multimodal ensembles’ that are ‘orchestrated’ intentionally to achieve the desired effects of their authors’ (p. 2). Working with multimodality requires writers to organise (orchestrate) different resources in the text to achieve ‘harmony in designing a multimodal ensemble’ (Hafner and Ho 2020, p. 12).

Recently, there has been some research interest in DMC with (emergent) bi/multilinguals in a range of contexts (Table 1). The review of the literature below explores how DMC has been used in these settings by focusing on teachers’ practices.

Table 1. Previous research on DMC with (emergent) bi/multilinguals.

Publication	Research timeframe	Geographical location	Students’ age / grade	Students’ languages
Dagenais et al. (2017)	Unspecified	Canada	11–12 y.o. 14–18 y.o.	French Portuguese Cantonese Mandarin Tagalog Spanish Farsi Thai
Liaw and Accurso (2021)	Four years	USA	5^th Grade	Chinese
Pacheco, Smith, and Carr (2017) Smith, Pacheco, and de Almeida (2017)	Unspecified	USA	8^th Grade	Spanish Mandarin Pashto Thai Vietnamese Arabic Bahdini & Sorani Mushunguli
Rowe 2019;	Unspecified	USA	2^nd Grade	Spanish Farsi Karen Kinyarwanda Arabic Amharic
Rowe and Miller 2016	Two years	USA	4 y.o.	Spanish Burmese Nepali Kurdish English

The use of multimodality

DMC in linguistically diverse settings is often reported to include a range of meaning-making resources. Teachers encourage students to use different combinations of written texts, images, student-generated photographs and drawings, songs, music, voice-recording and animation in their digital texts (Dagenais et al. 2017; Liaw and Accurso 2021; Pacheco, Smith, and Carr 2017; Rowe and Miller 2016; Smith, Pacheco, and de Almeida 2017). The use of oral language and an opportunity to do voice recording, available in digital composing, has been found to be especially beneficial for such learners. It supports the inclusion of students’ languages, creates new learning opportunities and makes meaning-making across named languages publicly valued as a resource for learning (Rowe 2019; Rowe and Miller 2016). However, availability of these semiotic resources does not necessarily lead to successful inclusion of a full range of students’ linguistic repertoires: children may have different degrees of willingness to compose in their home languages (Rowe and Miller 2016) and teachers may value and do more work with print-based texts (Dagenais et al. 2017).

Compositional freedom

Teachers can take different approaches to the composing process. Some research documented ‘compositional freedom’ (Smith, Pacheco, and de Almeida 2017, p. 19) meaning that teachers do not excessively control the process. Teachers may assign a broader topic for digital texts but (emergent) bi/multilingual students are encouraged to choose their specific stories (Dagenais et al. 2017; Pacheco and Smith 2015). Some teachers do not require students to create storyboards allowing them to ‘dive’ into multimodal composing and see what is possible (Smith, Pacheco, and de Almeida 2017). Compositional freedom is given in terms of any entry point to the composing (e.g. visuals or print-based text) (Dagenais et al. 2017; Smith, Pacheco, and de Almeida 2017) as well as the use of students’ languages (Pacheco and Smith 2015).

In contrast, sometimes DMC is reported to be excessively supported and even co-authored with a teacher (Dagenais et al. 2017). This occurs when teachers become pre-occupied with the product (e.g. students’ texts). As Dagenais et al. (2017) argue this approach may be a result of school policies around languages, importance of accuracy for teachers and their perception of publishing opportunities of the software. Interestingly, students may resist such product-centred focus and engage in ‘process-centred exploratory play’ (Rowe and Miller 2016, p. 445) with multimodal composing, experimenting with different modes of meaning-making and their effects. In this light, Liaw and Accurso (2021) recommend that teachers need to shift their focus from the product to the process because it is the process that usually offers rich learning opportunities.

Google translate

Research acknowledges that scaffolding of DMC is more challenging when teachers do not speak students’ home languages. Google Translate was used by the teacher in one such setting in a study conducted by Dagenais et al. (2017). While the teacher acknowledged that translation is not always accurate, Google Translate appeared to be a useful tool to start ‘awareness discussions about similarities and differences across languages’ (p. 273). In the settings where teachers had a shared language with students and could help with translations, however, a strong stance against Google Translate due to its accuracy amongst the teachers was documented.

Sharing students’ work

Another important aspect of teachers’ use of multimodal texts is related to sharing students’ work. Previous research often reports that teachers encourage (emergent) bi/multilingual students to share their work with their peers (Pacheco, Smith, and Carr 2017; Rowe 2019; Rowe and Miller 2016) as well as wide school communities such as students and teachers in other classes (Pacheco, Smith, and Carr 2017) and families (Rowe and Miller 2016). The availability of voice-recording is regarded as especially useful for publicly legitimising home languages (Rowe and Miller 2016).

Although the research reported above provides important insights, pedagogies for digital multimodal composing in multilingual settings are ‘relatively new’ (Liaw and Accurso 2021, p. 91) and research on DMC in linguistically diverse settings is still emerging (Shin et al. 2021; Yi, Shin, and Cimasko 2020). The way teachers adapt DMC in order to bring plurilingual strategies into linguistically diverse classrooms remains under-explored.

Affordances

In order to investigate how teachers adapted their professional learning about DMC in their own linguistically diverse classrooms, we used the concept of affordances. This concept allowed us to consider what both the professional learning and different teaching settings ‘offered’ and how this was interpreted and taken up by the teachers. Coined by the psychologist James J. Gibson, the construct of affordance explains a property in the relationship between organisms and environments: when an organism recognises certain information offered by the environment and takes actions in response to the offering in certain way, the offering becomes an affordance for the action (Gibson 1979). Offerings from the environment can always exist, but an offering does not become an affordance until it is perceived by an organism as inviting for actions. As Tella and Harjanne (2007) explain, ‘[w]hat becomes an affordance depends on what environmental properties an organism perceives and considers relevant from the point of view of action and, finally, what this organism does in order to create this relationship’ (p. 501).

Affordances are, therefore, not deemed to be solely a physical attribute of the environment, nor the action of an agent, but the relational and action-driven link between the perceiver and the perceived (Letiche and Lissack 2009; Lissack 2012). In a classroom, for example, multiple digital devices might be available, but they are not necessarily affordances. Only when the teachers see how to make use of them for teaching, do they become teaching affordances. When certain properties of the digital devices or applications are found to have the potential to foster plurilingual strategies, then the devices or applications can be viewed as affording the uptake of these strategies.

As researchers, we saw this potential in DMC. We knew that students’ home language literacy practices were likely to vary greatly, and understood from scholarship that the use of the aural mode in digital multimodal composing would allow us to cater for this. We also knew that DMC could lead to positive student engagement. We were interested in how teachers interpreted and took up the opportunities of DMC for bringing students’ extended linguistic repertoire into classrooms in an attempt to develop a deeper understanding of possible affordances.

Methods

The study was informed by a design-based approach, which relies on iterative sub-cycles of analysis and exploration, design and construction, and evaluation and reflection (McKenney and Reeves 2018). In this approach, researchers and practitioners collaborate on instructional hypotheses, which are then refined as they are explored in the classroom. The instructional hypothesis for the research discussed in this paper was part of the analysis and exploration sub-cycle: digital multimodal composing can encourage implementation of plurilingual strategies. The project was approved by the Monash University Human Ethics Committee (ID 23587). All the participants, including teachers, students and parents, provided informed consent/assent.

The study involved eight primary and middle school teachers from five government schools in Victoria. The teachers participated in a 2-day (non-consecutive) professional learning programme designed by the research team. Professional learning aimed to help teachers develop practical plurilingual strategies for their teaching contexts and teaching objectives from the Victorian EAL Curriculum. These strategies included (1) ways teachers could learn about their students’ language practices in more detail and (2) how they could help students notice similarities and differences between their home languages and English as a way to improve their language awareness and skills. DMC was a further focus of the professional learning. The teachers learned (1) what different modes of meaning-making can offer (emergent) bi/multilinguals and (2) how DMC can be organised and scaffolded in classrooms. With the support of the research team, the teachers designed, taught and reflected on a sequence of lessons. As part of this sequence, students created digital multimodal books that drew on their extended linguistic resources.

In this article we draw on data from four teachers whose details are summarised in Table 2. These teachers were selected because they were especially creative in the way they adapted DMC for the needs of their students with various degrees of confidence with home literacy practices.

Table 2. Teachers’ details.

Teacher*	Miriam	Xuan	Nick	Reiko
School	Primary government school	English Language School	Primary government school; Japanese-English bilingual program	Primary government school; Japanese-English bilingual program
Teaching area	EAL	EAL	Generalist English teacher	Generalist English teacher
Years of teaching experience	35	5	7	6
Career stage**	Highly accomplished	Graduate	Highly accomplished	Proficient
Year level / student age	Year 3/4 9–11 y.o.	11–14 y.o.	Year 1/2 7–8 y.o.	Year 2 7–8 y.o.
Student languages	Tagalog Somali Mandarin Telugu Malayalam Arabic Vietnamese	Assyrian and Arabic*** Samoan	Japanese Mandarin Cantonese Indonesian Hindi	Japanese Mandarin Italian German
Theme of the digital books	Celebrations	My name	Identity book: ‘What makes me “me”?’	A comic strip ‘Emotions’

* Pseudonyms

** Australian Professional Standards for Teachers identify four progressive career stages: graduate, proficient, highly accomplished, lead (https://www.aitsl.edu.au/standards)

*** Home literacy practices appeared to be related to Arabic. Students reported speaking both Assyrian and Arabic

Teachers’ data included lesson sequences, reflections on the sequence and individual interviews (see Table 3 for further details). Student data included work samples.

Table 3. Reflections and interview details.

Method	Reflections	Interviews
Length	40 min	25–35 min
Type	Group	Individual
Language	English	English
Mode	Face-to-face	Online (via Zoom)
Recording/transcription	Audio-recorded and transcribed	Audio-recorded and transcribed

Data was analysed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2019). Our point of departure for the reflexive analysis was our own interpretations of the two benefits of DMC that informed the professional learning: (1) the inclusion of an aural mode as a useful tool for students who were not confident with print-based literacy practices, and (2) the potential for positive engagement in a creative process. We coded data according to these benefits and then identified affordances as the main themes, or patterns of meaning (cf Braun and Clarke 2019). The aural mode of meaning-making was found to be an affordance for the teachers in different ways and, within the positive engagement coding, the two main affordances identified related to a playful composing process and a flexible interplay of languages and modes. Members of the team worked independently to code the data and identify these affordances and then met to discuss and reach consensus. We did cross-reference of reflections in informal support sessions.

Findings

In this section we present the findings on how the teachers interpreted and used DMC for the inclusion of plurilingual strategies. The findings are discussed in relation to three main themes, or affordances of digital multimodal composing: (1) an aural mode of meaning-making, (2) a playful composing process and (3) a flexible interplay of languages and modes in digital texts.

An aural mode of meaning-making

The presence of an aural mode was particularly useful for the implementation of plurilingual strategies. The use of voiceover was introduced to the teachers in the professional learning as an aspect of DMC conducive to a plurilingual approach when students had various degrees of confidence with home literacy practices. While the inclusion of voiceover in digital books was new to all teachers, they actively embraced it and, importantly, saw other possibilities for the use of an aural mode for learning in their linguistically diverse classrooms.

This leveraging of the aural mode was central to digital multimodal books produced by the students. The students were shown examples of the books with voiceover and teachers reported that they found them very inspiring. Rieko and Xuan reflected on their students’ reactions to the opportunity to include a voiceover:

What really excited them was the audio element that they got to record, that they would be able to record something in the language. And some of them said: ‘But Ms, I can’t speak this language very well, do I need to have an audio element?’… Some that were worried about the writing that they wouldn’t be able to write correctly. Some – about the speaking. But they all wanted to try the whole thing. They didn’t think about not talking or not writing. (Rieko)

They just wanted to share their voice on the screen and in a book, somehow. I think that’s a very, very useful format for students. It beats writing, by far. (Xuan)

The data suggests that using the aural mode as an affordance of digital multimodal composing was especially useful for students who were still developing their print-based and oral literacies in different languages. The use of the aural mode allowed for the inclusion of students’ different written and oral capacities, and also for the possibility of extending them. Students appeared to be motivated to write or speak in their home languages even when they lacked confidence in their linguistic knowledge.

Miriam also saw possibilities of the aural mode in the process of the creation of the books. Miriam’s students used the voice function of Google Translate in the activities leading to digital composing:

We used Google Translate as a strategy for translating, and that worked really well… Some languages worked really, really well because they have the audio that goes with it. So the kids, even if they couldn’t read their language, could put the English in, translate it, and then they could listen to it. And they could say, ‘Well, that’s not quite right’, you know, ‘I wouldn’t say that’… And often they could change the English. Then they’d listen to their home language and say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s right. That’s the word I wanted’. … It meant that students who couldn’t read their language very well were able to listen to it, and they were able to modify it that way.

Miriam did not share her students’ home languages, and she was open to the use of Google Translate in the classroom. A voice-to-text function of Google Translate appeared to be especially useful because it afforded bringing varying literacy practices into learning, capitalising on even a small degree of linguistic knowledge. Google Translate was also used as a starting point to discuss similarities and differences between the languages, allowing for a negotiation of understanding of written language.

Another way in which the teachers adapted the use of the aural mode was related to sharing students’ books. Miriam’s and Xuan’s students shared their work with the rest of the class and a wider school community, while the books in Nick’s and Rieko’s classes were shared with parents. Miriam described her students’ experiences:

They could save it [book] as a video and then take it back to their classrooms and the teacher could play it for the rest of the class. So the rest of the class got the opportunity to hear them speaking in their language… They may have felt a bit shy to actually stand up in front of the class and read in their language. But they could take it back and they could show it… And one child even had theirs played at assembly for the whole school. And it meant they could do that and show off their language knowledge without having to actually stand up in front of everybody to do it.

The use of the aural mode facilitated the use of home languages beyond teachers’ classroom: students’ home languages ‘entered’ the mainstream classrooms and family domains. As Miriam’s data suggests, availability of the voice-recording for sharing gave (emergent) bi/multilinguals confidence to use their languages and not to be overwhelmed by fluency and accuracy in live reading. Given that using home languages in the school settings was new to students, many were shy to read in home languages in front of their peers. However, they felt comfortable playing the voice recording which was practised and rehearsed until they were content with its quality. In this way, students’ home language practices were publicly celebrated and, thus, validated and legitimised.

A playful composing process

During the professional learning, there was a focus on the importance of process in DMC and opportunities to experiment with digital technologies. The teachers were encouraged to allow students to explore the ways in which production apps work, particularly through trial and error. A playful composing process was mainly seen as an important opportunity for students to explore what was possible with specific apps in terms of design and to develop skills required for production. However, Miriam found that focusing on process in the sense of doing things more than once and being creative afforded rich and extensive use of home language practices. Miriam reflected on students’ playful experimentation during the composing process:

I could send them off to a little withdrawal room and say, ‘Well, you go and record your voice’, and they could do it as many times as they liked. They loved creating their front covers and doing all of that sort of stuff… I’d want them to be typing in their text and they’d be busy making it beautiful. They enjoy interacting with those [fonts and colours]… And it almost tricks them into spending a whole lot of time on their text because they’re having so much fun.

Miriam was not preoccupied with making ‘perfect’ books and she perceived the process through which students interact with texts as more important. Thus, she provided space for experimenting with multimodality. The students perceived this as an opportunity to design something ‘beautiful’ which increased their interaction and engagement with written and oral texts in different languages. Permission to make multiple recordings of their narration allowed students to practise pronunciation in different languages. It was not clear from the interview data if the students were making changes to improve their written expression as they experimented. However, through a playful composing process with fonts, colours, images, voiceover, the students created for themselves multiple opportunities for re-drafting and revising their work which, in turn, allowed for further consolidation of understandings and skills.

A flexible interplay of languages and modes

In the professional learning, teachers were shown traditional examples of bilingual texts which are usually called ‘side-by-side’ or ‘parallel’ because they have two (or more) different languages on the same page with the second language typically being a translation of the first. The teachers adapted this typical orchestration to cater for diverse linguistic profiles in their multilingual classrooms. They guided students’ digital multimodal production in more flexible ways and prompted students to rely on different semiotic resources in different parts of the books. Analysis identified a number of variations in terms of how students’ ideas were expressed in different languages and through different modes.

In some cases, side-by-side translation was attempted but it was not achieved due to students’ varying knowledge of languages (Figure 1; Table 4). The teachers were not overtly preoccupied with accuracy of the translation but rather used this as an opportunity to welcome any knowledge of languages and draw on it as a learning resource.

Figure 1. A page from the book ‘Halloween’ by Hao (pseudonym; Miriam’s student).

A screen-print of a digital book capturing a Halloween scene with haunted houses, pumpkins, lanterns and a graveyard which is accompanied by text in English and Vietnamese ‘They wear scary costumes and carry scary toys’.

Table 4. Transcription and translation of the page.

	Written text	Oral text
English	They wear scary costumes and carry scary toys.	[They wear scary costumes and carry scary toys.]
Vietnamese	Họ mặc những bộ trang phục đáng sợ và mang theo [They wear scary costumes and carry]	[Đứa nhỏ đem đi chơi mặc đồ ấy để rồi thấy ghê, đồ chơi, đồ giả…] [Children go out wearing costumes so as to look scary, with toys, fake artefacts.]

As evident, while Hao attempted to do side-by-side translation, the English and Vietnamese do not match. The written Vietnamese version is incomplete: it is missing ‘scary toys’. However, the student uses ‘scary’ and ‘toys’ in the oral version which may signal that while he knew how to pronounce these words, he might not know how to spell them. This could also potentially have been a simple mishap when cutting and pasting from Google Translate which still suggests that his capacity to read in Vietnamese was not enough for him to notice the mistake. He also uses ‘children’ (Đứa nhỏ) in the oral Vietnamese version while the written texts in English and Vietnamese both have ‘they’/’họ’. This may be a very pragmatic choice as the word ‘children’ in Vietnamese and English seems to be longer and, thus, more difficult for spelling. Importantly, Hao’s oral version in Vietnamese has many additional words (đi chơi (go out), ấy để rồi (so as to), đồ giả (fake artefacts)) and a more sophisticated sentence structure than his English texts. This suggests that he was not just translating the English sentence into Vietnamese nor reading the Vietnamese sentence. The teacher’s approach to DMC allowed for a flexible interplay of languages and modes which, in turn, gave him an opportunity to draw on any knowledge of Vietnamese and English in the book and reveal his knowledge.

Another example of such interplay was evident in the books produced by Nick’s students. Figure 2 and Table 5 illustrate a page from a book in which the student produced more in the aural mode than in the written mode.

Figure 2. A page from the book ‘What makes me ‘me’?’ (Nick’s student).

A screen-print of a digital book capturing de-identified student’s name, his visual representation, two family photos and a book ‘Noah’s Ark’. There is a ‘listen’ button in the top right corner of the page.

Table 5. Transcription and translation of the page.

	Written text	Oral text
English	[Name]. Noah’s ark. Listen
Japanese		いまからぼくにとって、特別なものを紹介します。自転車は僕にとって特別です。どうして […] 二十二年トレックお母さんとお父さん自転車が […] からです。終わります。ありがとうございました。 [From now, I’ll introduce the special things to me. Bikes are special to me. Because in [. .]22, [with] my mother and father [I went] on a bike trek. Finished. Thank you very much.]

This page of the book mainly draws on visual and aural modes of meaning making. The voiceover provides a description of some visual elements. Although the oral speech has some omissions and errors, it meaningfully complements students’ visuals as well as provides further insights into the important role of bikes in his life (e.g. bikes are special to me). Writing this text in Japanese might have been demanding for a Year 1/2 student in the context of the multi-page book. Thus, the central focus on the aural mode on this page helped Nick, the teacher, to cater for different written and oral competencies. Furthermore, for Nick, this approach aimed to fulfil another important aim in bilingual books:

I think the most important thing making it effective and powerful multilingual text is not translating. It is having a purpose, not just, ‘This is this part in English and underneath we’ve got the same thing in Japanese or Spanish or whatever’. I think that loses power and just becomes a translational activity.

Building on this idea, Nick approached the use of languages in the books creatively. Table 6 illustrates the extract from his lesson sequence which suggests that students were instructed to use different languages for different pages. The context was a Japanese-English bilingual school, and these languages were highlighted in the lesson sequence. Some pages were written in English, some were in Japanese and some were bilingual.

Table 6. Extract from Nick’s lesson sequence.

Page number	Page content	Languages
1	Title and front cover	Japanese and English
2	Index and glossary	English
3	Topic sentence and home languages	Japanese and English
4	Likes and dislikes (&why)	Japanese
5	Strengths	English
6	Family and traditions	Japanese
7	Celebrations	English
8	Hopes and dreams	Japanese and English

Nick’s data suggests that he questioned side-by-side translation typically used in multilingual books and adapted his approach to DMC accordingly. Nick deliberately encouraged a more flexible interplay of languages and modes not only because it catered for students’ different language needs and strengths but also because he thought it plays a very important role in meaning-making. Languages and other modes were orchestrated in such a way that complemented and extended the meanings created by each of them. His approach to multimodal orchestration not only afforded implementation of plurilingual strategies but also resulted in creative and engaging designs. This approach was situated in a bilingual education setting, but can also be adopted for the inclusion of home language practices more generally.

Discussion

This research was set up to address the challenges associated with the incorporation of plurilingual strategies in linguistically diverse settings noted by previous research (Alisaari et al. 2019; Lin 2015; Turner 2019; Turner, Nguyen and Premier 2022). DMC was considered to be a useful way forward, given the findings of scholarship on DMC with emergent bi/multilingual students (Dagenais et al. 2017; Liaw et al. 2021; Smith, Pacheco, and de Almeida 2017; Pacheco, Smith, and Carr 2017; Rowe 2019; Rowe and Miller 2016). Ways in which teachers interpreted and adapted DMC in order to bring plurilingual strategies into their linguistically diverse classrooms were explored.

We, as researchers, had our own interpretations of how DMC might support plurilingual strategies and these informed the professional learning that was implemented in the study. Teachers engaged with these ideas, and adapted DMC to their classrooms according to their own interpretations. The study found that the main DMC affordances which allowed for the teachers’ uptake of plurilingual strategies were (1) the aural mode of meaning-making, (2) a playful composing process and (3) a flexible interplay of languages and modes. This finding suggests that DMC offers rich opportunities for implementation of plurilingual strategies but they need to be recognised and actioned by the teachers. The three affordances help to understand how DMC can be used to support the implementation of plurilingual strategies and guide practitioners towards experimenting with the use of DMC in general. The insights we gained through the teachers contribute to the growing body of research literature in the field (Dagenais et al. 2017; Liaw et al. 2021; Smith, Pacheco, and de Almeida 2017; Pacheco, Smith, and Carr 2017; Rowe 2019; Rowe and Miller 2016) by deepening the existing understanding of affordances of DMC in linguistically diverse settings.

In this study, one way in which DMC supported the implementation of plurilingual strategies was found to be the use of the aural mode of meaning-making at different stages of multimodal composing. In particular, we identified several specific ways in which it can be used to facilitate plurilingual strategies: (1) doing voice recording for narration (e.g. voiceover), (2) translating using the audio function in Google Translate and (3) playing the audio recording when sharing digital texts. Yi, Shin, and Cimasko (2020) argue that linguistic and visual modes are most frequently examined in digital multimodal composing but other modes, while being also important, are under-researched. Furthermore, previous research has found that teachers do not always recognise its value and/or pursue related opportunities (Dagenais et al. 2017; Rowe and Miller 2016). Our research suggests that the aural mode of meaning-making available in DMC and its use in different stages of composing holds significant potential for plurilingual strategies, thereby contributing further evidence to the scholarship emerging in this space (Rowe 2019; Rowe and Miller 2016). This is especially useful for contexts where students have varying knowledge and skills in home languages.

DMC also afforded plurilingual pedagogy in contexts of linguistic diversity through a playful composing process. This finding reflects but also extends the notion of ‘compositional freedom’ (Smith, Pacheco, and de Almeida 2017, p. 19). Previous research has mainly discussed compositional freedom in terms of students’ multimodal choices and provision of scaffolding activities (Dagenais et al. 2017; Pacheco and Smith 2015; Smith, Pacheco, and de Almeida 2017). This study draws attention to opportunities and even encouragement of multiple drafts and revisions across different modes and language variations. Smith, Pacheco, and de Almeida (2017) argue that there is a need to understand how to achieve ‘a scaffolding balance’ (p. 19). In response to this call, similar to Liaw and Accurso (2021), our findings illuminate a valuable gain for bi/multilingual students (e.g. more extensive use of languages) if teachers allow for a focused but unstructured and playful process. In contexts where the linguistic profile of students is diverse, such an approach to DMC allows differentiation for diverse needs.

Finally, DMC supported the use of plurilingual strategies in the participants’ classrooms because teachers facilitated a flexible interplay of languages and modes. They allowed for variations in terms of how students’ ideas were expressed. English did not have to match other language practices; oral and written forms did not have to match; different parts of multimodal texts drew on different languages and modes. The notion of ‘multimodal orchestration’ (Hafner and Ho 2020, p. 12) is often used to discuss the design of multimodal texts. Drawing on this idea, our findings identify specific strategies that were used by the teachers to support the design of the digital multimodal texts. Teachers’ strong focus on ‘products’ of digital multimodal composing in an attempt to make them perfect as well as relying on traditional text types have been criticised for reducing learning opportunities for students (Dagenais et al. 2017; Smith, Pacheco, and de Almeida 2017). As evident in this study, moving away from ‘perfect’ multimodal texts and traditional side-by-side design of bi/multilingual texts caters for diversity of language competencies as well as for rich learning opportunities and creative text designs. It also reduced cognitive demands associated with use of different languages which has been noted as problematic in previous research (Smith, Pacheco, and de Almeida 2017). This is especially significant when DMC is used with younger students.

Implications and conclusion

In this article we have focused on affordances of DMC for plurilingual strategies in linguistically diverse education settings. Although it was a small-scale project, the findings reported here have useful pedagogical implications. It has been widely recognised that digital multimodal composing offers multiple benefits to learners in different settings (e.g. Yi, Shin, and Cimasko 2020). The affordances documented in this research can help to maximise learning opportunities in linguistically diverse contexts where students may have very different kinds - and degrees - of exposure to home languages.

The aural mode of meaning-making in all composing stages is especially beneficial when (emergent) bi/multilingual students do not have a great deal of confidence in home literacy practices. Given that previous research documented some resistance (Rowe and Miller 2016), students can be explicitly encouraged and inspired to draw on their oral language. Showing high quality examples of multimodal texts which have a narration in different languages can help with this. Next, the production of digital multimodal texts can be framed as a playful process in which students edit their texts in an attempt to make them beautiful, interesting and engaging for their intended audiences. Experimenting with voice recording, fonts, colours, page layouts may increase their engagement with a range of language resources while also helping them to develop multimodal literacies. This process may incorporate an unstructured dimension in order to give the students the freedom to explore multimodal choices and possibilities. Finally, the teachers found it to be beneficial to allow for a creative interplay of languages and modes in digital multimodal production in multilingual settings rather than relying on traditional side-by-side designs. Such an approach reduces the challenge of teachers feeling as if they need to ensure accuracy in languages that they do not share with students. It also helps to decrease high cognitive load (a lot of written text) for young students. This approach has the potential to lead to creative, rich and meaningful digital multimodal texts where multiple semiotic modes complement, extend and enrich rather than duplicate each other.

In conclusion, DMC was found to offer a number of opportunities to bring linguistic diversity into classrooms; however, the opportunities need to be recognised and actioned by the teachers. Understanding these opportunities as affordances – or as intrinsically linked to teachers’ interpretation – has the potential to improve the use of DMC as an approach to teaching and learning. This can, in turn, act as an enabler for bringing plurilingual strategies into the classroom, and to maximise learning opportunities for emergent bi/multilingual students.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The Department of Education and Training, Victoria.

Notes

1 In academic literature, composing practices in which students create texts purposefully using and mixing different semiotic modes and different languages have been referred to as “multilingual/multimodal composing” (Liaw and Accurso 2021, p. 90), “multimodal codemeshing” (Pacheco and Smith 2015, p. 293) and “multilingual digital storytelling” (Anderson and Macleroy 2017, p. 497). We refer to these practices as digital multimodal composing (DMC) because we view multimodality as including linguistic variation in the linguistic mode.