Impact of Multimodal Critical Literacy Training on Students’ Critical Understanding of ESL Texts

With spoken and written texts reflecting increasing multimodality, ESL learners need to evolve a repertoire of strategies that can enable them to develop a critical comprehension of text meanings. College-level ESL learners learning to communicate for professional purposes need this essential kind of literacy, although the present methodologies do not focus on awareness of multimodality and associated strategies. The study significantly enhances the effectiveness of multimodality in ESL learning through critical understanding as the incumbent methods lack this approach. The purpose of this study was to plan and teach eight to ten lessons that incorporate awareness-raising of multimodality and development of critical literacy to freshmen college learners of National University of Modern Languages, Rawalpindi and Shifa College of Medicine, Rawalpindi. These lessons are part of the English class of undergraduate students where English is compulsory and taught to this group of learners. This study took the experimental approach by selecting a group of freshmen English language learners, both from engineering and medical fields. Pre-test and post-test data are collected from both teams by administering identical tests assessing the learners' reading comprehension. The study identifies that multimodality is preparing students to learn ESL efficiently. Students learn effectively through different modes, for instance, through oral, written and visual representations. The results of pre-test and post-test found that Multimodal learning is more effectivein critical understanding for it can help inactive classroom learning, inspireslearners and motivate them to read by navigating, interpret and design the multimodel text of ESL, As far the responses of the interview were concerned most of ESL learners agreed that the use of multimodality is increasing their interest in learning. The results can help the teachers in curriculum formation based on the learning strategies found in the study.