Facilitating EFL students’ civic participation through digital multimodal composing

Abstract

Although there is a growing call for L2/EFL teachers to connect the words they teach in classrooms with the world students participate outside classrooms, opportunities for L2/EFL students to engage with civic participation (CP) in language curricula remains limited. Drawing on student-authored videos from a digital multimodal composing (DMC) programme in China, this study reports on students’ manifestation of CP during DMC. Data from student-authored videos, classroom observation, and interviews reveal that the students used DMC for three forms of CP, including advocacy of the sexually discriminated, fundraising efforts for the left-behind children stricken by poverty, and promoting civic learning of disease-related knowledge and protection measures. The findings also reveal that these forms of CP were manifested by the students’ creative remixing of videos and visuals and ingenious layering of student-generated narrations based on their authentic concerns and community experiences. Implications on how DMC can be used to facilitate students’ CP in language curricula are discussed.