Multimodality: Communication Skills for Today's Generation

Encourage learners to think critically and communicate creatively through images, video, and audio

Multimodality: Communication Skills for Today's Generation

It’s time to update our definition of literacy

Did you know the four skills are no longer enough to communicate successfully in today’s world?

  • Expand your learners’ communications skills beyond speaking and writing by teaching them to express themselves through images, videos, and other multimedia.
  • Encourage your learners to analyse, explore, and discuss multimedia – just like you would with reading and listening texts.

What is multimodality?

Traditionally, we have thought of literacy as the ability to communicate through reading, writing, listening, and speaking. But in our digital age, we are as likely to use video, images audio and even gestures as modes of communication. The ability to understand and share information through a combination of these modes is known as multimodal literacy.

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Everyone who downloads our position papers will also receive a toolkit of practical resources to help them implement the advice of our experts. Try out this sample resource from our Global Skills paper, designed to improve your learners’ collaboration skills and help them communicate more effectively.

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Expert Toolkit

Meet our Expert Panel

We collaborate with an Expert Panel of world-leading academics and educators in English Language Teaching. Why does this matter to you? The Expert Panel ensures that research-based support informs our products and services, meeting your needs and the needs of your students in the best possible way.

Kieran Donaghy

Kieran Donaghy

Kieran Donaghy is the Director of Pedagogy of The School for Training, a specialist teacher development institute in Barcelona, and Film English, an independent digital publishing company.

He is a writer, conference speaker, and trainer who works with teachers all over the world.

He is the author of books for students and teachers of English as a foreign language. He is the founder of The Image Conference, the only conference exclusively on the use of images in language teaching, and co-founder of the Visual Arts Circle, a professional community of practice for language education professionals interested in the use of the visual arts in language teaching. In 2013, he was awarded the British Council ELTONs award for Innovation in Teacher Resources. Kieran is the author of the paper.

Sylvia Karastathi

Sylvia Karastathi

Dr Sylvia Karastathi is a teacher, educator, and lecturer with over ten years’ experience in higher education. She has recently joined LanguageCert as Head of Teacher Support, and continues to serve as an adjunct lecturer at the Ionian University, teaching English Literature and Culture in the Department of Foreign Languages, Translation, and Interpreting, and co-ordinating the department’s graduate teacher development program. She holds a PhD in English Literature and Visual Culture from the University of Cambridge and a Diploma in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (DELTA). Her research interests and publications are in the areas of language education and visual literacy, multimodality, word and image studies, and post-millennial fiction and visual culture. Sylvia is a consultant on this paper.

nik peachey circle

Nik Peachey

Nik Peachey is Director of Pedagogy at PeacheyPublications, an independent digital publishing and consultancy company that specialises in the design of digital learning materials.

He has been involved in education since 1990 as a teacher, trainer, educational consultant, and project manager. He has more than 25 years’ experience of working specifically with online, remote, and blended learning environments.

He has worked all over the world training teachers and developing innovative and creative products. He is a two-time British Council Innovations award winner and has been shortlisted six times.

He is also editor of the Edtech & ELT Newsletter: tinyletter.com/technogogy. Nik is a consultant on this paper.