Exploring the social nature of multimodal texts in a language classroom using texts from Intermón Oxfam

Abstract

The main changes proposed by the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) in the last years and the increase of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) imply changes in the teaching-learning process at tertiary level. Consequently, the university classroom will take into consideration the importance of audiovisual culture in the XXI century in order to overcome the traditional forms of literary mainly based on written texts to develop multiliteracies in which the images, sounds and other semiotic resources are present in the classroom. This paper intends to be an example of introducing multimodality at the University level. Students of the second year of the degree in English Studies at the University of Alicante were introduced to reading images by using authentic texts produced by the international NGO Intermón Oxfam in 2012. In this way, students learned to read multimodal texts in which images were very important in order to understand the meaning of the texts as a whole. Moreover, the nature of the texts under analysis helped students develop their critical thinking due to the fact that they portray the image of people from other cultures.