The integration of multimodality in English teaching in Indonesian junior high schools

The study employs two analytical approaches of multimodal social semiotics, guided by the grammar of visual design (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006, 1996), and content analysis, driven by the multiliteracies pedagogy framework (Cope and Kalantzis, 2015).<br><br>The results indicate that all English teachers across three school contexts have brought different multimodal resources in their English teaching materials, represented mainly by pictorial and visual resources.

Despite that, these resources are primarily used to support the achievement of the language-based (English) instructional goals, and are not yet used to facilitate the students’ multimodal literacy development as well as their engagement with multimodality as the meaning-making resources. Therefore, the integration of multimodality in the classroom instruction as enshrined in the SLM policy has not worked in the classroom-level practices of the English teaching and learning process.

The multimodality is already brought into the classroom as represented in the instructional materials, but it is not yet integrated into the pedagogical process (curriculum) as the focus of instruction remains on English-based instruction.