Beliefs about multimodality with English learners and their peers in the content areas: A mixed methods study of pre-service teachers

Abstract

A substantial body of research highlights the promise of multimodal instruction and assessment for English learners (ELs) in the content areas. However, realizing this promise will likely require that teachers develop beliefs conducive to enacting multimodal pedagogies in their classrooms. This sequential mixed methods study employed the researcher-developed Beliefs about Multimodality in Instruction and Assessment with English Learners (BAMIA-EL) questionnaire to investigate pre-service teachers’ (PSTs’) beliefs about multimodality. Following a rigorous design process, the 16-item questionnaire was administered to 96 PSTs. A subset of 11 PSTs participated in retrospective interviews in which they explained their responses to each item. Findings from the quantitative analysis indicated that PSTs’ beliefs about multimodal instruction were largely favorable, while their beliefs about multimodal assessment were more varied. Findings from the qualitative analysis helped explain and complicate the quantitative findings. For example, whereas PSTs’ questionnaire responses indicated favorable beliefs about multimodality with ELs, the interviews revealed that PSTs adopted a narrow view of nonlinguistic modalities as compensatory scaffolds toward English language development. This study offers substantive implications for preparing teachers to cultivate the rich meaning-­making resources that ELs bring to content classrooms as well as methodological implications for emerging research on teachers’ beliefs about multimodality.

Keywords:

• assessment
• English learners
• mixed methods
• multimodality
• teacher beliefs

Disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Institutional review board approval

The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of Miami (Study #: 20210841).

Additional information

Funding

None.