Teacher engagement with digital multimodal composing in a Chinese tertiary EFL curriculum

I Introduction

In recent years, there is an ongoing call for teachers in TESOL and related fields to engage with digital multimodal composing (DMC), a textual practice that involves the use of digital tools to construct texts by combining words and other semiotic resources (e.g. image, soundtrack). Such call is mainly driven by the observation of theorists in multimodality and the new literacies studies (e.g. Jones & Hafner, 2012; Kress, 2003; Lotherington & Jenson, 2011) that digital technology has expanded the repertoire of resources for meaning making. Given the omnipresence of various forms of DMC (e.g. video-composing, podcasting) in contemporary second language (L2) learners’ everyday literacy practice, L2 teachers are expected by literacy scholars (e.g. Hafner, 2015; Siegel, 2012) to use DMC in teaching so as to engage learners in language instruction and to prepare learners for their future literate lives in a digitally saturated world. However, given the long-standing view of language and language learning as linguistically based, this expectation is rarely fulfilled by teachers (Yi & Choi, 2015). The pedagogic use of DMC remains limited in mainstream language curriculum (Early, Kendrick & Potts, 2015) and few studies have explored how L2 teachers engage with DMC in classrooms. To help L2 learners engage with new literacies, we need to have a thorough understanding of teacher engagement with DMC. Moreover, as teacher engagement is a critical prerequisite for learners’ access to digital and multimodal learning in classrooms, research on this construct can contribute to the current theorizing of DMC-integrated L2 pedagogy. It can also shed useful light on teacher education for multimodal curricular changes in digital age.

This paper reports on an exploratory multiple-case study conducted against this backdrop to investigate five teachers’ engagement with DMC in a Chinese tertiary-level EFL curriculum. By presenting a holistic and contextualized case analysis, we attempt to uncover the complexity of teacher engagement with DMC and the influencing factors, in the hope of providing insights into the process through which L2 teachers engage with DMC.

II Background literature

In general, engagement refers to the extent students and teachers are invested or committed to their learning or teaching (Fredricks, 2013). It is an umbrella term which brings together students’ and teachers’ degree of attention, interest and willingness to deploy a repertoire of skills, strategies or activities to make progress. In primary/secondary education, teacher engagement is generally defined as ‘a teacher’s psychological investment in an effort toward teaching the knowledge, skills, and crafts he or she wishes students to master’ (Louis & Smith, 1992, p. 120). In the present study, teacher engagement with DMC means teachers’ pedagogical motivation and efforts toward using DMC in L2 teaching.

This study is grounded in a multimodal view of language as one semiotic resource for communication, which entails simultaneous use of multiple modes, including but are not limited to word, image, gaze, gesture, and movement (Kress, 2010). Thus literacy in L2 classrooms is more than a mere set of cognitive skills located in individual minds because it is multiple, involving meaning making in different modes (Hafner, 2015). In TESOL, there have been ongoing scholarly calls for L2 professionals’ attention to DMC and multimodal pedagogies (Early, Kendrick & Potts, 2015; Kress, 2000; Stein, 2000). Kress (2000) suggests that TESOL professionals should not ‘act as though language fully represented the meanings they wish to encode and communicate’ (p. 237). Stein (2000) argues that teachers should work with students’ diverse resources and conceptualize classrooms ‘as semiotic spaces in which human beings who are the agents of their own meaning making produce multimodal texts’ (p. 333). In their recent special topic issue, Early, Kendrick and Potts (2015) also call for a need to ‘bring issues of multimodality and meaning making squarely into the center of TESOL’s concerns’ (p. 451). Over the past two decades, a growing body of L2 researchers has documented how L2 learners engage with DMC across various contexts, including an undergraduate L2 writing classroom in the USA (Dzekoe, 2017), university-based L2 curricula in Hong Kong (Hafner, 2015) and a composition course for university students in Taiwan (Yang, 2012). These studies have collectively shown that multimodal practice such as DMC is motivational for learners’ productive meaning making with linguistic, aural, visual, spatial and gestural modes, lending supports to the necessity of its pedagogical use for L2 learning and teaching.

In comparison to L2 learners’ engagement with DMC in and outside of school, research on teacher engagement is limited and inconclusive. On the one hand, a few L2 researchers observe that teachers have effectively used various multimodal resources as instructional tools, including comics (Danzak, 2011), animation (DeCoursey, 2012) and video (Jiang & Luk, 2016). Some teachers themselves also created digital stories of a book that English learners read in class (Lotherington, Holland, Sotoudeh & Zentena, 2008). On the other hand, researchers (Lotherington & Jenson, 2011) note that the value of DMC for teaching and learning has not been widely accepted by L2 teachers. When attempting to engage with DMC, some teachers ‘feel unprepared for integrating such practices into their curricula’ (Yi & Angay-Crowder, 2016, p. 988), and others raise concerns (e.g. lack of time due to a need for test-preparation, discrepancy between DMC and print-based assessment), with skeptical views of the impact of DMC upon learner achievement (Yi & Choi, 2015). Overall, these studies show that teacher engagement with DMC is multifaceted and dynamic, warranting further conceptualization and research.

To conceptualize teacher engagement with DMC, Leander’s (2009) work offers a helpful starting point. According to Leander (2009), teachers may manifest four stances of engaging with new literacy practices such as DMC: resistance, replacement, return, and remediation. Teachers of a ‘resistance’ stance usually see DMC as interfering with print literacy practices, with reluctance to move from traditional literacy learning to multimodal practice. Teachers of a ‘replacement’ stance tend to regard the print-based literacy in schools as outdated and irrelevant, highlighting a need to replace conventional reading and writing with DMC. For teachers of a ‘return’ stance, they tend to treat DMC as secondary to print-based literacy. These teachers tend to only assess the print and language use in learners’ multimodal work (Smythe & Neufeld, 2010). These teachers appear to embrace a ‘weak version of multimodality’ (Grapin, 2019) as they tend to privilege language and take nonlinguistic modes as scaffolds for L2 learners’ language development. Finally, the ‘remediation’ stance sees different media/literacies as neither interfering with nor replacing one another, but takes the creation of meanings with semiotic resources and effects upon audiences as central concerns. Teachers of this stance often adopt a ‘strong version of multimodality’ (Grapin, 2019) and usually enact a parallel pedagogy, which is ‘a way of describing how old and new literacy practices, including print texts and visual texts, may be fruitfully taught side-by-side, rather than the ‘old’ being a precursor to the new or being replaced by it’ (Leander, 2009, p. 150). In existing literature, it seems that L2 teachers usually engage with DMC with a ‘resistance’ stance (Lotherington & Jenson, 2011; Tour, 2015). There is rather limited portrait of teachers who enact the other three stances.

Whether and how language teachers manifest a certain stance when engaging with DMC in practice, according to sociocultural theory, is mediated by both contextual and teacher factors (Grossman, Smagorinsky & Valencia, 1999). These factors, however, are relatively underexplored in existing literature. While contextual factors, including high-stakes testing and print-based assessment, have been frequently reported in existing literature (e.g. Smythe & Neufeld, 2010) as barriers for teachers to engage with DMC, it remains unclear whether and how teachers would negotiate these contextual factors when engaging with DMC. What is also unclear is whether and how such negotiation and engagement may be further mediated by other factors, which include but are not limited to teachers’ identities, previous experiences and beliefs about students, language and language learning. In an earlier interview study that was conducted with 26 Australian primary teachers, McDougall (2010) reports that teachers’ reaction to teaching new literacy is varied and such varied response is mediated by three forms of teacher identity, including traditionalism, survival, and futures. According to McDougall (2010), while teachers of a traditional identity prefer traditional reading and writing as the priority in teaching, teachers of a future-oriented identity recognize a need to change the priorities and teachers operating in a survival mode manifest a need for self-preservation. Nonetheless, despite the illuminating findings, McDougall’s (2010) study focuses on teacher identity with reference to only interview data, leaving other factors such as teachers’ conceptions of language and language learning unexplored. Overall, in existing literature, empirical research on teacher engagement with DMC is rare, perhaps due to the methodological difficulties in observing teacher engagement in practice as a result of the limited incorporation of DMC in L2 curricula. To address the research gap, the current study following a multiple-case study approach (Yin, 2003) was conducted, involving five EFL teachers in a Chinese tertiary EFL curriculum over one academic year. This approach enables us to gain an in-depth understanding of teacher engagement with DMC in situated contexts. Specifically, the following questions guided the present study:

III Research context and participants

The context for the study is an EFL curriculum known as College English (CE) in a public university located in southeast China. In the university, the curriculum was governed by the College English Curriculum Requirement (CECR), which was issued by the Ministry of Education in China. As suggested by CECR, a blended instructional model that combines computer lab and traditional classrooms was adopted for CE teaching and learning. As a credit-bearing mandatory course, CE was team-taught by 35 teachers in the university. These teachers were given a unified teaching syllabus, which regulated the content and the rate of teaching.

Similar to other curricular contexts, the CE curriculum was exam-oriented and textbook-based. The primary objective of the curriculum was to develop students’ communicative competence in English. The university had a practice of assessing CE teaching performance according to the pass rate of one test known as College English Test (CET) in China. The test content is related to a series of textbook that was endorsed by the Ministry of Education and selected by the university as a major artifact for English teaching and learning. Teachers were expected to teach the prescribed textbook content, although they were allowed to integrate materials of their own choice to supplement teaching.

Other curricular features were related to big class size and the controlled use of technologies in class. In the university, each CE class consisted of 30–50 students and each teacher was assigned 4–6 classes. For lessons in computer lab, there was a combination of 3–6 classes of nearly 100–200 students. In computer lab, students were not allowed to do things such as playing with mobile phone, online chatting, or downloading any materials other than English. These digitally-mediated activities, according to the director of the CE department, were considered by the university as ‘not relevant to English learning’. However, the director complained about the controlled use of technologies had led to student disengagement in computer lab.

Setting against this backdrop, the director approached the authors for ways to incorporate technologies and multimodal resources in CE teaching. The authors proposed a DMC program, with digital video production as a major form of multimodal composing. The director accepted the proposal and sent out invitations to teachers in the CE department. Five teachers (Yi, Jun, Lian, Min, Fan, pseudonyms) volunteered to implement the DMC program in their classrooms over one academic year, offering an opportunity for the researchers to observe and analyse their engagement with DMC. These five teachers had Master degrees in language teaching, with similar teaching workloads (4–6 classes) at the time of the study. Although they had approximately 15 years’ experience of teaching, they had not incorporated DMC in teaching before. They joined the program out of an interest to explore how DMC can be used in their classrooms. Yi and Jun joined in the first semester and the other three joined in the second semester of the academic year. While different entry time made it difficult for the three teachers to implement more DMC projects, they were able to adopt DMC quickly in their teaching with the help from Yi and Jun. So we decided to include the three teachers as they enriched the data sources of this study.

The authors offered a briefing workshop (introducing the characteristics of DMC and relevant literature that reports teachers’ use of DMC in different contexts) to the teacher participants before they joined the program. While the authors offered assistances to teachers when necessary, it was the teachers who decided when, why and how to implement the DMC projects. Throughout the process, the first author took on the role of ethnographic researcher, documenting teacher engagement with DMC as a participant observer.

The five teachers took the initiative in designing and implementing DMC projects in their respective classes. Within these DMC projects, the teachers introduced a range of digital tools (e.g. CorelVideoStudio) and multimodal resources (e.g. image) to students, who were encouraged to combine multiple resources and produce videos (each lasted around 2–6 minutes) to reflect their learning of curricular contents. In general, each teacher spent 4 to 6 weeks on one DMC project, which engaged students with seven major learning activities: (1) textbook reading; (2) grouping and brainstorming; (3) storyboarding and scene planning; (4) resource collecting; (5) resource producing through acting, recording and filming; (6) digital editing with software; (7) in-class display and sharing. Despite such similarities, the five teachers differed in their purposes of and approach to using DMC. These similarities and differences offer a substantial ground for the present study to explore teacher engagement with DMC.

IV Data collection

Multiple types of data (i.e. observation, interview and document) were collected from the five teachers. First, teachers’ participation in the 10 regular teacher meetings was observed, focusing on teachers’ pedagogical decisions in relation to the number, topics, modes, forms of composing (group work or solo), and evaluation methods. These regular meetings were collectively organized by the five teachers to plan and discuss their pedagogical arrangements when implementing the DMC projects. Teachers’ implementation in class was also observed, with a focus on what teachers said and did about DMC. Altogether 28 lessons (each lesson lasted 45 minutes, focusing on discussing and sharing students’ DMC projects) were observed. All observations were audio-recorded, with 30 entries of field notes taken. The field notes were descriptive in nature, documenting whatever was observed that may create a comprehensive and contextualized account of teacher engagement with DMC.

Then to get an emic perspective of teacher engagement, semi-structured interviews were conducted with each teacher before and after the DMC program. The before-program interview focused on their professional experience and attitudes toward DMC. In the after-program interview, the teachers were asked to talk about the DMC projects they implemented, including the rationale, attitudes and reflections. Each interview was audio-recorded and lasted around 90 minutes. Throughout the program, informal talks with each teacher were also conducted whenever the researchers had an inquiry about their engagement. These informal chats (36 in total) were recorded in field notes immediately after their occurrences. Finally, documents including teaching syllabus, rubrics for assessing student-authored videos and teachers’ pedagogical arrangement of DMC were also collected and used for triangulation purpose.

V Data analysis

An initial within-case analysis was first conducted to obtain a holistic understanding of each participant’s engagement with DMC, followed by a cross-case analysis of how the participants engaged with DMC. Facilitated by NVivo 11.0, we first organized transcripts, field notes, and documents by individual participant. An open coding was conducted on each participant’s transcript and textual segments that offered insights into the research questions were highlighted and then dragged into nodes, resulting in preliminary codes such as ‘language-dominant assessment’, ‘speaking and writing’, ‘multiliteracies’, ‘lack of confidence’ and ‘exams’. These codes were then constantly revised during the recursive coding of each participant. This process yielded a summary of each teacher’s engagement with DMC as well as the influencing factors. The summaries were then sent back to the teacher participants for accuracy check, with disagreements resolved through discussions.

After analysing each participant’s engagement, a cross-case analysis was conducted on a sequential and iterative basis (Miles & Huberman, 1994). First, the researchers individually read and compared the data both within and across the teacher participants to identify emerging codes and themes. This process allowed us to identify the similarities and differences among the five teachers. For instance, Jun and Fan both adopted a language-dominant approach to evaluate students’ videos, and Lian and Min shared a common feeling of uncertainty about using DMC. Then we noted that Yi was the only teacher who also evaluated students’ combination of multiple resources. Second, to enhance the trustworthiness of the analysis, the researchers jointly compared the themes and analysis. The themes that were commonly agreed upon were left as they were. For instance, the code ‘incidental attention to multimodality’ was retained to denote the evaluative practice of Jun and Fan after a joint comparison. When disagreement arose, we went back to the data and reanalysed them with reference to the relevant literature, with new codes added, overlapped codes merged and contested codes deleted. For instance, we consulted the literature and decided to code the five teachers’ understanding of what language is with two codes: ‘language as a linguistic system’, and ‘language as a semiotic resource’. These two codes were then categorized into another code: ‘impacting factor-individual conception of language’. After a reiterative process, we divided all the codes into two major categories, with one named as ‘engagement type’, and the other named as ‘impact factor’.

After that, the codes within each categories were further grouped, with similar codes merged and redundant codes deleted. For instance, we merged two codes (i.e. ‘uncertain to design DMC tasks’, ‘not sure how to assess’) into one overarching code: ‘ambivalent about the means’. Similarly, the code ‘using DMC for speaking and writing’ was further merged into another overarching code: ‘incidental attention to multimodality’. The codes ‘using DMC for broader goals’ and ‘various DMC activities’ were then integrated into an overarching code ‘DMC as integral’. When all the coding disagreements were resolved after a recursive process, we ended up with three key themes of teacher engagement among the five participants: engaging with DMC as incidental, ambivalent, and integral. These themes with selected examples are illustrated in the following section.

VI Findings

In general, the five teachers welcomed the use of video composing as a form of DMC in their classrooms. Yet the number of DMC projects implemented by the teachers varied from 2–7 (three were planned for each semester). Although the unevenness in number may be explained by the fact that the three teachers joined in the second semester, the five teachers had the same opportunities to make decisions concerning the composing forms, modes, genres and assessment methods, despite their different entry time. Specifically, while all the five teachers required students to compose in groups (each group comprised 4–6 students) on assigned topics in textbook (e.g. marriage, first impression, culture shock), three teachers (Yi, Lian, Min) also allowed students to go solo on open topics, regardless of the associated workload. In terms of genre, narrative and storytelling were preferred by all the five teachers, whereas argumentation was also encouraged by Yi and Lian. When evaluating student-authored multimodal videos, all the five teachers attended to English use, but three of them (Yi, Lian, Min) also attempted to assess students’ strategic use of multimodal resources. Overall, in accordance with the teachers’ experiences and perceptions, three forms of teacher engagement (i.e. incidental, ambivalent, integral) were found among the five teachers. Each form of engagement is characterized by an individual teacher’s treatment of DMC opportunities through pedagogical practices concerning the topics, modes, forms, number, genres, and assessment methods of DMC projects. The definitions of the three forms of engagement and the teachers who manifested these forms are presented in Table 1. The analysis below is divided into these three forms, with elaborations on the specific components and the influencing factors in order to answer the research questions.

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Table 1.

Teacher engagement.

Engagement	Definitions	Teachers
Incidental	Using DMC merely as an instrument for textbook-based linguistic training with little or only incidental attention to the digital combination of multimodal resources	Jun, Fan
Ambivalent	Enjoyed using DMC in teaching yet uncertain about the means and the end of using it	Lian, Min
Integral	Using DMC as an integral approach for multiple literacies learning with attention to not only students’ language use, but also to the digital combination of multimodal resources	Yi

DMC = digital multimodal composing.

1 DMC as incidental

Engaging with DMC as incidental means using DMC mainly as an instrument for textbook-based learning of linguistic skills (e.g. speaking, writing), with little or incidental attention to digital orchestration of multimodal resources during DMC. Two teachers (Jun, Fan) engaged with DMC as incidental, manifesting a stance of ‘return’ (Leander, 2009) and a ‘weak version of multimodality’ (Grapin, 2019). Such engagement is characterized by a tight control over students’ DMC and a language-centered assessment to student-authored multimodal videos.

While there were multiple ways to compose videos, Jun and Fan not only required students to compose on textbook-prescribed topics with groups, but also preferred a performance-based approach to DMC, which asked students to write the script of a drama/play, act out the drama/play with bodily performance, and then edit the video-recorded performances into a video similar to a micro-movie. With such control over students’ composing topics and modes, Jun and Fan expected their students to use DMC for the purpose of developing linguistic skills rather than multimodal composing skills. This preference was evident when Jun and Fan explained their teaching arrangement in the fourth meeting:

Jun:

I told my students to compose in groups rather than individually. We simply have too many students. They also have to compose on topics in textbooks. I don’t accept open topics because in that way, the students won’t learn what is prescribed in the textbook.

Fan:

Me too. I asked students to perform the story they wrote and then video-record their performance. By doing so, they practice not only writing, but also speaking.

While one educational affordance of DMC is to offer students a widened range of choices in meaning-making with multiple modes (Jiang, 2017), Jun and Fan set a limit to students’ choices by assigning fixed composing modes to students. First, both Jun and Fan required their students to base their multimodal compositions on the modes of writing and speech, supplemented by the gestural mode (i.e. performance). For Jun, this preference was related to her prior experience in helping students video-record the speaking performance, while for Fan, he believed that performance was a ‘good way’ to engage students with speaking. Then neither Jun nor Fan assigned the task of solo composing because they found it ‘formidable’ to deal with the workload (final interview). They expected students to combine video-composing with curricular content so as not to influence students’ textbook-mediated conventional learning of speech and writing. As a result, over the academic year, the students in Jun’s and Fan’s classes were limited to DMC activities that used writing and speech as the primary semiotic resources for meaning making (see Table 2).

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Table 2.

Students’ digital multimodal composing (DMC) in Jun’s and Fan’s classes.

Mode	Topics/Form	Activity
Writing and speech	Textbook-assigned, group composing	Write a story and read the story aloud
Writing, speech and performance	Textbook-assigned, group composing	Write a story, perform the story, adds voiceover and/or music

In terms of assessment, both Jun and Fan positioned themselves as an authority and in video-sharing sessions, they seldom engaged students with peer feedback, which they considered ‘not credible and inefficient’ (informal-talk). Instead, they gave a score based on their own judgment of students’ writing and speech in multimodal videos. This practice can be seen from a snapshot (Figure 1) that is taken from Jun’s courseware when she explained how her students’ work would be evaluated.

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Figure 1.

A snapshot of Jun’s scoring standard.

Fan had the same evaluative practice with Jun. While they sometimes were impressed by students’ humor in video-recorded performance, they mainly attended to students’ pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary use when assessing the videos, with little attention to students’ orchestration of digital and multimodal resources. Such evaluative practice reveals Jun’s and Fan’s insistence on taking linguistic modes as what was important in the multimodal composing process. Consequently, Jun and Fan have sidelined other modes in their assessment of students’ multimodal compositions.

Overall, Jun and Fan dealt with DMC as auxiliary to language learning and this was not because a lack of confidence to teach DMC, but because they firmly considered language learning as ‘the core of their professional responsibility’ (1st interview). Although they noted that the involvement of digital media and multimodal resources in DMC was motivating to students, they worried that students would have engaged with DMC mostly for ‘entertainment purpose’. Such concern was evident in final interviews:

I’m their English teacher and my job is to teach them how to use English in a grammatically acceptable way. But in their videos, students did not make good use of the expressions that we taught in class. They were not self-disciplined to use English well if I did not require them to! They enjoyed using digital stuffs such as colors and images in their video as if they were very cool. They forgot that it was their ability to using English systematically that was important during DMC, not their digital skills. (Fan, final interview)

I don’t think it necessary for students to spend much time on digital editing with resources such as image and animation. That kind of editing won’t be tested. But engaging students with video-recording of their oral performance is good because in our curriculum, we do not have adequate time for oral practice. College English learners had been critiqued for a long time for their inability to communicate orally. (Jun, final interview)

Jun and Fan defended their more traditional approach to DMC because they felt that their key responsibility (or instructional priority) was to teach literacy in English, and that the involvement of ‘digital stuff’ was simply a diversion from their core business. The sense of pressure evident in Jun’s response also illustrates the impact of contextual factors, i.e. the high-stakes exams and public critiques (inability to communicate orally), which she cited as discourses that defined her role as a language teacher. Moreover, in Fan’s response, students were perceived as lack of self-discipline to use English ‘systemically’ and tend to indulge in ‘digital stuff’. Fan brought up this concern again in the seventh meeting:

Fan: We have to insist on using English. Otherwise students would use DMC merely for fun . . . I don’t believe these students would know what is more important for them. Vocabulary, grammar and syntax are what they need most before they can use English properly in their videos . . .

Fan’s account implies that he adopted a seemingly pessimistic view of students, together with his personal theory of language as a linguistic system, to justify his incidental engagement with DMC as an activity for linguistic training, rather than for broader goals (e.g. developing multiliteracies). Such views highlight a ‘deeply-entrenched traditionalism’ (McDougall, 2010, p. 684) that defines EFL teachers’ engagement with DMC. To sum up, Jun and Fan used DMC as incidental and secondary to the conventional goal of language learning and this engagement was mediated by not only the contextual factors, but also the teachers’ conceptions of what they should do as a traditional language teacher, their personal theory of language, prior experiences as well as their pessimistic view of students.

3 DMC as integral

Engaging with DMC as integral is a form of engagement that gradually emerged toward the end of the academic year. Yi was the only teacher who manifested such engagement in the present study. Although similar to Lian and Min, Yi also felt a lack of confidence in the beginning about using DMC, she gradually managed to conquer her ambivalence and used DMC as an integral part of her teaching for broader goals such as developing students’ multiliteracies. Such shift was mainly mediated by Yi’s willingness to listen to students and her dialogues with the researchers (who introduced literature on using DMC) and other teachers. In general, Yi’s DMC implementation took on two distinctive features. First, she gradually loosened her control and allowed students to decide the genres, topics, modes, and forms for their video production. She explained this change:

Researcher:

Today you allowed students to do solo composing. Why?

Yi:

Students complained that group composing is too constraining. They want more freedom in video composing. For the same reason, I also encourage students to compose on self-selected topics. (Informal-talk)

As indicated by this informal conversation, different from Jun and Fan, Yi had a loose perception of herself as an authority in class. This explains why she could integrate students’ perspectives into her DMC implementation, offering students with more autonomous choices.

Second, Yi gradually shifted from using DMC as an activity for oral English practice to using it as a necessary way for developing multiple skills such as the ability to think critically with multiple resources. In Yi’s teaching, she valued students’ ability to use multiple resources to express messages for particular purposes. According to Yi, the ability to think critically occurred not only in writing and speaking, but also in multimodal composing. This explains why Yi would engage with DMC for multiliteracies rather than merely for linguistic learning. By doing this, her engagement differed significantly from that of Jun and Fan, who remained content to using DMC as secondary to L2 writing and speech. Yi’s integral engagement was manifested in her comments in class not only on the language used in students’ videos, but also on the content, purpose, choices of modes/resources, and audience awareness in student-authored videos:

Yi:

I need to draw your attention to the overall purpose of your videos. You need to consider your audience. What will they think of your video content? Once you have a clear answer to such questions, you can start to consider critically what modes or resources to choose and how to organize them in an order that can serve your purpose. You don’t have to always begin with writing. You can also begin your composing with images. For example, you can take photos and then think about a story based on those photos . . . (Classroom observation)

Different from Jun and Fan who insisted on using writing and speech as the primary mode of meaning making, Yi encouraged her students to compose with multiple visual resources. In the end, students in Yi’s classes were able to engage with multiple forms of DMC activities (see Table 3).

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Table 3.

Students’ digital multimodal composing (DMC) in Yi’s classes.

Mode	Topics/form	Activity
Image and writing	Open	Take images, write text
Film and speech	Open	Film-shooting, write a story, reads, and retell
Writing and image/video and speech	Open	Write a story, adds image/video, and speak/read

Table 3 indicates that Yi was able to engage students with multiple ways of multimodal design (Kress, 2010). Her students’ DMC manifested a wider range of diversity in video composing, with some based their compositions on visual representations and some composed texts with images accompanied by texts and voiceover. In response to such diversity, Yi adopted a beyond-language evaluative practice (see Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

A snapshot of Yi’s assessment practice.

This beyond-language assessment practice aligned with Yi’s perceived instructional priorities, an essential part of which was ‘developing students’ ability to think’ (1st interview). It also demonstrated that EFL teachers, although they may not be as technology-literate as students, could still use their expertise as analysts and critics of texts to guide students through the DMC process (Ryan, Scott & Walsh, 2010).

Allowing student autonomy in the choices of composing modes, forms and topics and the endeavor to use DMC for broader goals such as multiliteracies (e.g. the ability to think critically with multiple resources) increased not only workload, but also pedagogical unpredictability for Yi. However, different from other teachers who reported a loss of confidence, Yi invested additional time and effort on students’ video work. She explained her engagement in final interview:

I’ve been telling my students that English learning is not just about grammar and passing tests. What is more important is the ability to using English to participate in activities. During DMC, they need to think about how to interact with different digital tools, resources, and people. This is more important for their future! Also, no students told me that their exam had been influenced! On the contrary, many reported an increase in their exam score because they had better understood the textbook content during DMC. So this is why I say DMC is good, although it took me a lot more time. I also reaped many benefits. I know students better through their videos. And I got a very high score in students’ evaluation for my course.

It became clear that Yi’s engagement with DMC as integral to her teaching was mediated by a future-oriented belief of what she should do as an English teacher. Closely related to this view is her personal theorizing of language as a resource for meaning-making, rather than a linguistic system. Guided by such a conception, Yi was able to guide students to embrace DMC for both traditional (e.g. exam preparation) and broader goals (e.g. multiliteracies) in language learning. Different from Jun and Fan, Yi also had an optimistic view of students, believing that they can develop multiliteracies during DMC without negative impact on their traditional learning and exams. With such a belief, Yi did not perceive DMC as posing a threat to her capacity to ensure her students to achieve in more traditional forms of learning. It is also significant that that Yi’s students rewarded Yi with a high score in course evaluation and other teachers, such as Lian and Min, identified Yi as being a leader in the pedagogical use of digital videos. Such identifications would have no doubt reinforced Yi’s future-oriented view of what she should do as a language teacher during DMC.

VII Discussion and conclusions

Based on five language teachers’ participation in a year-long DMC program within a university-based EFL curriculum in China, this study reveals three forms of teacher engagement with DMC. The first form is incidental engagement, manifested by Jun and Fan who used DMC as an instrument for L2 writing and speaking, with only incidental attention to the multimodal aspects of learning associated with DMC. In response to the question that has been frequently reported in literature (e.g. Yi & Choi, 2015), namely, whether DMC can be bridged to academic learning of traditional writing and speaking, Jun and Fan offered a positive answer with empirical evidences. Yet it should be noted that their incidental engagement had not only led to a limited range of DMC activities (see Table 2) for students to access to, but also sidelined modes other than writing and speech in their assessment of students’ DMC.

The second form of engagement is displayed by Lian and Min who manifested ambivalence and uncertainty about the means (e.g. composing tasks, assessment methods) and the ends (e.g. using DMC to motivate, to prepare for exam-oriented linguistic skills, or to develop multiliteracies) of using DMC. This form of engagement has been rarely reported in literature. Yet it lends further support to McDougall’s (2010) observation that engaging with new literacy practices such as DMC would lead to struggles in language teachers’ professional experiences. Nevertheless, the present study adds to the literature by revealing that such struggles and ambivalence were not shared by all the five teachers. For Jun and Fan in their incidental engagement, ambivalence did not exist as they were mainly determined to using DMC as scaffolds for developing students’ linguistic skills. For Yi, who manifested the third form of engagement, her initial struggles were gradually replaced by a growing confidence in engaging with DMC as an integral part of her teaching for broader goals that include but are not limited to language learning. Mediated by her loose perception of herself as an authority and her beyond-language evaluative practice, she managed to guide students to be strategic users of multiple resources for a ‘critical message’ in their videos through a wide range of DMC activities (see Table 3). Yi’s integral engagement suggests that language teachers can draw on their expertise in text analysis and critiques as a source of knowledge to guide and support students’ digital text creations. Altogether, the three forms present a multifaceted and dynamic picture of teacher engagement with DMC.

The study also aimed to examine factors that influenced teacher engagement with DMC. As the findings show, teacher engagement with DMC is teachers’ individual construction mediated by both contextual factors and the individual characteristics that teachers brought to DMC. On the one hand, aligning with early studies (e.g. Yi & Choi, 2015), this study suggests that teacher engagement is subject to the impact of high-stakes exams and the prescribed curriculum, which explained Jun’s and Fan’s tight control over students’ composing topics and modes (see Table 2). However, different from the early literature (e.g. Yi & Angay-Crowder, 2016) that usually quotes these reasons as impeding factors for teachers to engage with DMC, the overall findings of this study indicate that the impediment deriving from contextual factors should be taken as perceived rather than as factual. In this study, the DMC program was implemented in one curriculum, within which all the five teachers were confronted with similar contextual constraints, including class size, the prescribed curriculum and mandated examinations. Nonetheless, the five teachers responded to these contextual constraints with different choices and took different actions in their pedagogical engagement with DMC. For instance, while high-stakes exam was cited as a reason by Lian and Min for their ambivalence in spending class time on DMC, Yi appeared to bridge DMC to students’ exam-preparation and multiple literacy learning. This indicates that contextual constraints can be dealt with in different ways by different teachers, depending on their individual characteristics (Grossman et al., 1999).

Compared to contextual factors, the mediating role of individual characteristics (e.g. teachers’ conceptions of themselves, language, and students) in shaping teacher engagement with DMC has been rarely reported in literature. For Jun and Fan who seemed to draw on a ‘traditionalist’ discourse in language teaching (McDougall, 2010), the findings show that they positioned themselves as authority, with a pessimistic view of students that they would ‘indulge’ in DMC merely ‘for fun’. Their language-focused evaluative practice and incidental use of DMC for traditional linguistic training indicate their conception of language as a linguistic system that had little relevance to other multimodal resources. For Lian and Min who manifested uncertainty and ambivalence when teaching new literacies, they also tended to accept themselves as authority. Such inclination explained their concerns over dispossessing authority when engaging with DMC without prior experiences. Their confusion over the link between DMC and language–focused exams indicate that they also took language as a linguistic system that can be tested separately from multimodality. In addition to the frequently cited reasons (e.g. lack of time) in previous studies (e.g. Yi & Choi, 2015), a new finding of this study is that Lian and Min also justified their engagement with a view that students of future generation would naturally become multimodal composers. However, such as natural view was not accepted by Yi, who had an optimistic view of students, believing that they can learn multiple skills during DMC while also develop traditional language skills. Her loose conception of herself as an authority also explains why lack of prior experiences with DMC hadn’t let her fear losing authority in the same way as what Lian and Min had. Moreover, her integral use of DMC for broader educational goals was closely related to her personal conception of language as a meaning making resource intertwined with other digital tools and modes. Such semiotic understanding of language turns out to be central in Yi’s ‘future-oriented’ view of what she should do as a language teacher.

Given the challenges of getting teachers to engage with DMC in contemporary instructional environments, this study can offer important implications for teacher engagement with DMC in L2 pedagogy. First, as the study shows, the five teachers came to the DMC program with various beliefs of what they should do as language teachers. Such beliefs not only influence how teachers position themselves to new literacy practices, but also how they act towards such practices within their contexts. There is thus a critical need for L2 teachers, particularly those who draw on a ‘traditionalist’ discourse to define their teaching priority, to rethink the core responsibilities of L2 teachers during curricular change at digital age. This does not mean that the basics in the traditional language teaching have become invalid. As manifested by Yi, it would be more productive if language teachers could consider how examining language ‘as it is nestled and embedded within a wider semiotic future’ (Jewitt, 2017, p. 2) could help language learners communicate effectively in the new era. Such change in consideration necessitates a shift in conceptualizing language. Instead of defining ‘language as an autonomous, self-defining system, separated from other semiotic resources’, L2 teachers should situate ‘language in spatial and material ecologies’, and treat ‘language as one among diverse other semiotic resources’ (Canagarajah, 2018, p. 35). It should also be noted that embracing such a semiotic view of language does not mean teachers have to sacrifice their pedagogical confidence. As illustrated by Yi, language teachers can still capitalize on their experiences and expertise in textual analysis to guide students through multimodal text construction. This means that the concerns over language teachers’ lack of expertise to engage with DMC may be a myth to be unpacked.

Furthermore, to encourage L2 teachers to develop a future-oriented view of their professional responsibility, there is also a need for language teachers to reject a ‘pessimistic’ or ‘natural’ view of students. Instead of adopting a ‘wait-and-see’ attitude or imposing a tight control upon students, the present study argues that L2 teachers should position L2 learners as strategic users of multiple modes with an optimistic lens (as what Yi did). This is not only because of the passive nature of the ‘natural’ view, but also because the concerns over students’ ‘indulgence in fun’ or exam performance may turn out to be unnecessary. As manifested by Yi, her integral engagement with DMC seemed to engage students with multiple literacy learning without negative impact on their exams and traditional linguistic learning. Based on such findings, the present study argues that engaging with DMC in L2 pedagogy is necessary and the nonlinguistic modes should be used not only as scaffolds for language development, but also as semiotic resources for productive meaning making.

It is also important not to lose sight of the role of collective inquiry in promoting teacher engagement with DMC. In this study, the five teachers met regularly and exchanged their experiences. Although they manifested various forms of engagement with DMC, they formed a collegial environment within which Yi was perceived by the other teachers as a leader in using DMC. Such positioning not only validated Yi’s future-oriented view of what she should do as a language teacher, but also mediated Yi’s engagement with DMC as integral. Although it remains to be further explored how the other teachers (e.g. Lian, Min) may change their engagement during the process, this study corroborates the role of a collegial environment in supporting teacher engagement with curricular innovations such as DMC integration (Carr & Chambers, 2006). Such an environment would be particularly relevant to teachers who work within a centralized and exam-oriented curriculum similar to the CE curriculum in this study. Future study could explore how teachers of various individual characteristics may change their beliefs and practices in different contexts in a collective manner by forming ‘affinity group’, which means a group that share ‘allegiance to, access to, and participation in specific practices’ (Gee, 2001, p. 105). Within such groups language teacher may refine their engagement with DMC when they are able to develop an affinity perspective on what they should do as L2 teachers within digitalized instructional environments.

Nevertheless, comparing teacher engagement with DMC among teachers is not to suggest that a reluctance to use DMC at an integral level is due to a lack of professionalism from teachers, though some extent of conservativeness may need to be acknowledged. Given that DMC is largely absent in language teachers’ professional experiences, it seems natural for L2 teachers to begin with (and remain at) incidental and ambivalent engagement with DMC for L2 teaching and learning. Otherwise, there may be another crisis for Jun and Fan, i.e. to lose their teacher roles, since they tended to view the core of their professional responsibilities as L2 teaching rather than digital composing. While using DMC as incidental allows L2 teachers to see the link between DMC and L2 speaking and writing, using DMC as integral make it possible for them to see how L2 learning could be repurposed and embedded into the learning context that is constructed by DMC. Thereby the present study argues that the three forms of engagement should be taken as a continuum rather than a hierarchy. It is likely in practice for L2 teachers to engage with DMC in their curricula in an incremental, recursive, and gradual manner.