Understanding how EFL learners enact civic engagement in English-language videos: A systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis approach

Learners’ civic engagement has increasingly been acknowledged as an important component of language curricula, especially in second/foreign language learning contexts. While digital multimodal composing (DMC) has been shown to provide opportunities for learners to engage with issues of public concern, relatively little research has examined how civic engagement is semiotically enacted and made communicable to audiences in multimodal texts. To address this gap, this study examines how six Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) undergraduates enacted civic engagement through English-language video projects on indigenous language preservation. Systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SFMDA) was applied to investigate the multimodal realisation of civic engagement across three meta-functions. Data included six student-authored videos and video-stimulated recall interviews, allowing triangulation between multimodal design practices and learners’ design rationales. Findings show that in their videos, students framed indigenous language preservation as a public issue with global significance, evoked the audience’s empathy, proposed solutions, and delivered knowledge about indigenous languages to a broader audience, via an intentional and creative orchestration of multimodal resources. This study further reports learners’ orchestration practices of multiple semiotic resources for communicating their civic engagement within the meta-functional construct. SFMDA is argued to be a useful approach for understanding students’ civic engagement in multimodal texts. Pedagogical implications are provided for integrating DMC into second- or foreign-language learning classrooms to enhance the civic engagement of multilingual learners.