ESL Primary Teachers’ Perspectives of Multimodality in 21st Century English Classroom

The aim of this paper is to explore primary ESL teachers’ perspectives of multimodality in English teaching. Multimodality is an evolution of means of communication through evolving technology encouraging teachers to integrate them in the classroom to support learners’ learning. Thus, it is of importance to study teachers’ perspectives of multimodality in 21 st Century English classrooms. This study employed a mixed method design with data collection of questionnaire survey and semi-structured interview. The data were analysed using SPSS and descriptive analysis. This present study investigates primary ESL teachers’ perspectives on multimodality in the classroom by collecting data from 42 ESL teachers through a survey and 3 teachers in an interview session from Jempol, Negeri Sembilan. The major findings revealed that teachers have positive perspectives on the integration of multimodality in English classrooms. Teachers are mostly familiar with the concept and frequently implement more than one resource to cater to students’ learning preferences as suggested by VARK. Teachers also emphasized that the implementation of multimodality benefited the most to speaking & listening skills, reading comprehension and vocabulary acquisition. It also highlighted that multimodality improves learners’ language, motivation and classroom engagement. The only challenge highlighted was ‘access to good technology and Internet’ which can be a topic focus for further research.