Investigating the Potential of Multimodality in Enhancing Students’ learning

Students have become more visual, auditory, and tactile learners with the emergence of various media and their omnipresence in our daily lives. The emergence of various digital platforms hosting Massive Open Online Courses and learners’ recourse to them have proven that mono-modal input in the classroom has caused students to detach from the educational materials at hand, and this reflects on their level of interaction, performance, and acquisition. Thus, updating curricula, optimizing the educational discourse, and designing teaching materials that appeal to the sensory-motor skills of 20th-century students have become imperative. The urgency of this endeavor draws upon the call of the Moroccan Supreme Council of Education, Training, and Scientific Research (Avis du Conseil relatif au projet de loi n° 59.21 relatif à l’enseignement scolaire, 2021) to direct the focus toward updating and reforming curricula and textbooks. More than that, the new reform on the language policy projects the progressive introduction of English as a foreign language in primary schools, middle ones, and university departments. Hence, the imperative to scrutinize teaching/learning materials and analyze the ways in which the different semiotic choices interact in multimodal educational discourse to fulfill the objective under scrutiny. The researcher in this review article pinpoints the potential of multimodality in optimizing the teaching/learning discourse. Numerous researchers have utilized various methods pertaining to exact sciences to prove that the efficiency of multimodality can be supported with empirical data and tangible measurements that can be extracted from the classroom and practitioners’ innovative activities.