Resumen de An MDA Approach to vocabulary teaching in an EFL secondary education context
Studies on efl teachers’ instructional discourse have traditionally addressed interpersonal factors (Rounds 1987) or the different components of communicative competence (Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor 2006), among other aspects. In this line, multiple authors have emphasised the role of the semiotic resources that can be found within educational settings (Ruiz-Madrid and Fortanet-Gómez 2019; Garcia-Salvador and Ruiz-Madrid, forthcoming). Multimodal Discourse Analysis (mda) has expanded the traditional conception of educators’ instructional discourse and the pedagogical strategies that they employ when teaching content and language. Nevertheless, research has focused primarily on the study of Higher Education settings. Thus, scarce attention has been paid to Secondary Education. One of the key aspects of the efl curriculum in Spain is vocabulary. As reported in previous studies (Chanturia and Webb 2016; Nation 2008) teaching vocabulary in such a context is challenging. Teachers use different techniques to ensure students’ comprehension and learning. However, research has scarcely addressed how they resort to multimodal resources to convey pedagogical meaning. The aim of this paper is to show how a multimodal approach can shed some light on the study of teachers’ strategies for vocabulary teaching in the efl subject in Secondary Education. In order to achieve such objective, different audio-visual excerpts were examined. More specifically, they were extracted from 4 efl lessons conducted by two Secondary Education teachers. Specialised software was employed to examine the videos (Multimodal Analysis Video), and remarkable attention was paid to the analysis of both verbal and non-verbal embodied modes when efl teachers introduce new vocabulary to their students. Results exemplify the way in which efl instructors resort to intricate multimodal interplays for creating pedagogical affordances that facilitate vocabulary learning.