A Critical Study on Multimodal Composing Competence of University Students from Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan Regions

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Abstract

This study investigates the digital multimodal composing competence of fifty freshmen from Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan regions in a Chinese University based on a systemic functional approach to multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA) and sociosemiotic ethnography. These students are divided into six groups and are required to make presentations on topics like sports, fashion, festivals, environment, and cities. The collected data include students’ digital multimodal texts and interview responses. Findings show that a) students have the awareness of salience, but often misrepresent it; b) students are likely to confuse the relationship and function between the text and image as they often use the image with the least or redundant information to complement the text; c) students are likely to incorporate something irrelevant to the topic; d) students misuse the immersive image as a background due to lack of the concept of context; e) they usually provide excessive language information. This study also puts forward suggestions on the pedagogy of improving these students’ multimodal literacies through optimizing the existing teaching method and setting up an instantaneous recall feedback form.

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