In recent years, research in multimodality has established the benefits of using multiple semiotic modes like image, sound, and text in digital second language (L2) communication. However, researchers have yet to investigate how L2 learners make meaning through embodied modes--or gestures and facial expressions. Grounded in the social semiotic…

There is growing attention to student assessments designed to reach beyond the classroom, including assessments with an immediate or future audience. The impact of audience, however, has not been examined in multimodal assessments across continents, institutions, disciplines, and teaching contexts. Using qualitative data, this article examines the…

This collaborative project explores the affordances of a translation assignment in the context of a learner-centered pedagogy that places composition students' movement among languages and cultures as both a site for inquiry and subject of analysis. The translation assignment asks students to translate scholarly articles or culture stories from…

Youths' learner-generated designs, instantiated in digital practices, spaces and artifacts, are underutilized in schools. Additionally, digital media tools are often taken up in reductive ways that serve to perpetuate deficit discourses for youth from nondominant communities, rather than reflect the creativity and innovation that youth practice…

The media role model was recently developed to frame how science faculty members can teach their students to write more effectively to lay audiences (14). An Opinion Editorial (Op-Ed) was introduced as a novel assignment for final-year physiology and pharmacology undergraduates. This second phase of this study, reported here, demonstrated the…

A practicum was developed to determine whether the motivation of a private school's ninth grade English class (18 students) could be increased by gearing the course toward a specified, authentic public audience and whether an increase in motivation would positively affect the quality of and attitude toward writing assignments and the use of…

A study examined the role of audience in preservice mathematics education students' writing experiences. Subjects, students in two mathematics education classes taught by the same teacher, completed writing assignments explaining the principles of mathematics to elementary school pupils. Students in one class wrote to actual students, serving as…