Vocabulary in urban contexts using multimodality

This is the presentation of a new pedagogical tool. The tool is an alternative to the usual presentation of vocabulary focusing on some key concepts: multimodality, theory of space, and collaborative learning. Considering that the study of foreign languages has the difficulty of studying cultural elements that are usually not present in the life of the students, this paper will propose an activity to study vocabulary in a contextualized space. The objective is to understand social spaces through discovering lexical items in a natural environment, using the observation and description of urban photographs, which represents a change to the traditional way of presenting vocabulary. Through a collective and technology mediated process, the students create a multimodal artifact that can be shared with other students. The process of learning occurs, first, from the production of the artifact, and second, from the presentation and exchange of the artifacts produced among students.