Pedagogy of multiliteracies in CLIL: Innovating with the social systems, genre and multimodalities framework

Abstract

More than two decades after the conceptualization of “A pedagogy of multiliteracies” (PoM) by the New London Group (1996), the world has witnessed much pedagogical innovation in literacy education and radical technological advancement. However, few studies have shed light on how PoM can be actually practiced in non-western contexts. To fill this gap, this article proposes the social systems, genre and multimodalities framework as an instructional toolkit to practice PoM in English as an additional language contexts. To this end, the learning process of 240 Hong Kong secondary school students enrolled in an English-medium small private online course was investigated. The results show that PoM helps the students construct new learner identities and facilitates their content and language knowledge development. My study suggests that PoM can be enriched by offering students practical analytical toolkits and a multimodal autonomous learning environment.