Language Value
November 2018, Volume 10, Number 1
ISSN 1989-7103
Table of Contents
From the editor
Begoña Bellés-Fortuño
i-iii
Articles
Multimodal literacy in academic environments: PowerPoint as a motivational genre
Stefania Consonni
1-28
PowerPoint presentations in the classroom: Re-evaluating the genre
Larissa D’Angelo
29-44
Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art appreciation in primary school
Ruth Breeze
45-66
Teacher’s feedback vs. computer-generated feedback: A focus on articles
Tamara Hernández Puertas
67-88
Book Reviews
Arlene Archer and Esther Odilia Breuer
Multimodality in Higher Education
Lucía Bellés-Calvera
89-93
Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors
Language Value
November 2018, Volume 10, Number 1 pp. i-iii
ISSN 1989-7103
From the Editor
MULTIMODAL MEANS OF INSTRUCTION: BROADENING ACADEMIC
LITERACIES AND PRACTICES
Departing from the concept of multimodality as “a field of application rather than a
theory”
(Bezemer and Jewitt
2010:
180), the current volume aims at presenting
multimodal practices in different learning environments. Multimodal means of instruction
can overtly change communication landscapes in terms of spaces and texts. In this
volume, new academic identities are revised departing from multimodal texts (visual
texts, written texts that use images, written texts that discuss visuals, etc.) which combine
with the primary aim of generating meaning.
This issue intends to delve into the definition of Multimodality in order to promote
multimodal learning environments by revisiting theories and practices of multimodal
education. The volume includes valuable contributions to Multimodality in education
trying to ease the differences between conventional teaching practices and the fast
constant changes of the modern society (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2001). The volume
works as an updated reference for multimodality in different spaces, varied modes and
diverse texts within disciplinary variations for pedagogical practices.
The volume is divided into two main sections, a wider section with four full papers and a
following section with a book review. In the opening article of this volume Stefania
Consonni analyses PowerPoint (PPT) as a leading genre in academic discourse, focussing
on the implementation of student motivation boosting strategies. She explores how PPT
can be used to motivate teachers and students from two perspectives, ideational and
interactional, using multimodal and critical discourse analysis approaches.
In the next contribution, Larissa D’Angelo discusses the effectiveness of the pre-
formatted construction of discourse through PowerPoint presentations by observing the
abuse of bullet point presentations, the limited format and size of slides that support
minimum content and the ever-present risk of overwhelming viewers with too much text
Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors
i
From the Editor
or data. She concludes that multimodal PowerPoint artefacts simply enrich and
accompany what the presenter has to say, and recommends presenters to regain
confidence in their oratorial skill instead of allowing the slides dominate their
presentations.
In the next article, Ruth Breeze brings us closer to multimodality in Fine Arts. She
focuses on the genre of single image account (SIA) (Swales 2016) for didactic purposes
by examining pedagogical resources on the National Gallery’s website. She argues that
SIAs are combined with suggestions to enhance primary school pupils’ learning through
creative activities across a variety of modes. She eventually proposes guidelines for
writing SIAs for educational purposes in other contexts.
In the final contribution to this issue, Tamara Hernández analyses feedback on written
production and how the use of new technologies in the classroom such as Grammar
Checker can aid both, the teacher in the correction process and the students in their
language development. After comparing feedback provided by the teacher and feedback
provided by the software Grammar Checker to a group of English as foreign language
students, she concludes that Grammar Checker can be a potential tool for self-correction
and that feedback may facilitate students’ language development.
In the book review that follows, Lucía Bellés-Calvera revises the publication
Multimodality in Higher Education, by Archer and Breuer (2016). The volume deals with
multimodal writing practices and pedagogies in tertiary education. The work approaches
forms of academic writing that have been catalogued as academic genres, therefore
known by an academic discourse community that has previous knowledge on the genre
and its conventions. The volume is undoubtedly a valuable contribution to the
dissemination of multimodal knowledge in Higher Education.
I would like to close this Editorial by especially thanking my colleague and co-editor of
this volume Carmen Sancho Guinda. Likewise, I am grateful to all the scholars that have
collaborated in the peer-review process of the articles that make up this volume.
ii
Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors
Language Value
November 2018, Volume 10, Number 1 pp. i-iii
ISSN 1989-7103
Begoña Bellés-Fortuño
Editor
Universitat Jaume I, Spain
References
Bezemer, J. and Jewitt, C. 2010. “Multimodal Analysis: Key Issues”. In Litosseliti, L.
(Ed.), Research Methods in Linguistics. London: Continuum, 180-197.
Kress. G. and Van Leeuwen, T. 2001. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media
of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold.
Swales, J. 2016. “Configuring image and context: writing ‘about’ pictures”. English for
Specific Purposes, 41, 22-35.
iii
Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors
Language Value
November 2018, Volume 10, Number 1 pp. 1-28
ISSN 1989-7103
Multimodal literacy in academic environments: PowerPoint
as a motivational genre
Stefania Consonni
Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Italy
ABSTRACT
This paper explores PowerPoint (PPT) as a leading genre in academic discourse, focussing on the
implementation of student motivation boosting strategies. ICT nowadays plays an increasingly important
role in pedagogy, by reinforcing the informative and persuasive impact of instructional materials through
multimodal strategies including verbal and visual codes, as well as performative elements. A hybrid genre
in academic oratory, PPT offers corporeality of knowledge, modularity and easily transmittable format,
providing presentations with structure and facilitating ordering and summarizing operations. PPT can
therefore be ranked among today’s epistemic machineries, whereby knowledge is construed by discourse.
The paper analyses the semiotic and metadiscursive features of a corpus of presentations produced in
various universities for both academic staff and students. Research questions explore how PPT can be
used to motivate teachers and students, from both an ideational and interactional standpoint. An
integrated analytical approach is employed, bridging multimodal and critical discourse analysis.
Keywords: Multimodality, PowerPoint, digital literacy, motivation, academic discourse, genre analysis
I. INTRODUCTION
This paper addresses the ways in which Information and Communication Technology
(ICT), and particularly PowerPoint
(PPT), is affecting the semiotic and linguistic
features of academic communication, both in symmetric and asymmetric settings, with a
specific focus on the dissemination and implementation of student motivation boosting
strategies. Motivation is a major factor in today’s pedagogy: as the Latin root of the
word suggests, to motivate students means ‘to move’ them, i.e., to incentive or drive
them to act in order to achieve specific results or goals (Williams and Williams 2011:
2). As socio-cognitive psychology indicates, motivation and cognition work in concert,
in that individuals have the ability to discern how to regulate their behaviour so that it
meets their learning goals (Eccles and Wigfield 2002: 123). Research on the psycho-
pedagogy of foreign languages and the pedagogical influence of ICT (Dörnyei 2001;
Dörnyei and Schmidt 2001) has shown in particular that students should be encouraged
to play an active role in the educational process (Bellés-Fortuño and Ollero 2015: 146),
Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors
1
Stefania Consonni
for this can optimise the degree of their commitment to (and pleasure in) learning. This
means that reluctant learners can become self-regulated learners, i.e., they can learn how
to apply agency, purpose and self-efficacy beliefs, and set goals and performance
outcomes for themselves.
Presentation software nowadays plays an increasingly important role in supporting and
reinforcing the informative and persuasive impact of instructional materials through
multimodal strategies - including verbal and visual codes, structured and performative
elements, as well as kinesic and paralinguistic features
- which prove crucial in
motivating students. While there is some debate around the argumentative style of PPT,
especially targeting its syntactically deprived, noun-phrase-bullet-point repetitiveness
(Tufte
2003), evidence shows that, from the point of view of students, PPT’s
motivational impact cannot be denied, in terms of both promoting intentions and
boosting results (Amare 2006; Kosslyn et al. 2012; Stark and Paravel 2008; Susskind
2005). A number of affordances contribute to the pedagogical efficacy of slideshows,
including argumentative immediacy, corporeality of knowledge, modularity, easily
transmittable format
(Kaplan
2011), as well as the facilitation of pacing and
summarizing operations (Lari 2014; Paoletti et al. 2012).
This paper investigates the multi-literacy strategies employed in a corpus of
motivational PPT presentations from various universities, aimed at both academic staff
(i.e., instructing lecturers on how to motivate students) and at students themselves (i.e.,
offering advice on how to optimize resources and skills). An integrated methodological
framework will be employed, bridging multimodal, critical discourse and genre
analysis. As a matter of fact, PPT meaning-making processes stem from a conflation of
verbal language (Alley and Neely 2005; Blalock and Montgomery 2005; Burke and
James 2008; Paoletti et al. 2012), visual strategies (Clark 2008; Diani 2015; Wysocki
2003, 2007), and bodily communication, such as gesticulation and pointing (Jurado
2015; Knoblauch 2008), all of which make PPT a hybrid genre in academic oratory. As
multi-semiotic objects, PPTs will be here investigated from two intertwined
perspectives, stemming from Systemic Functional Grammar metafunctions (Halliday
2002, 2004):
2
Multimodal literacy in academic environments: PowerPoint as a motivational genre
(i) on the ideational level - dealing with the ways in which a visual and textual
construct can signify the ‘real’ world inside its semiotic boundaries, and thus
convey extra-linguistic experience (Halliday 2004: 29) - the representation of
informative meanings in PPTs will be examined. A typology of the semiotic
modes employed in the corpus will single out the referential strategies building a
unified image of students’ self-confidence and study skill optimisation. Such
multimodal analysis will highlight the visually realised aspect of motivation
discourse in the corpus, stimulating the following research question: to what
extent, and with what effects, does the intersemiotic translation of different modes
(Jakobson 1959: 233) shape the ideational component of PPT as a multi-literacy
genre in academic discourse?
(ii) on the interpersonal level
- dealing with the creation of contact and
engagement strategies between a visual and textual construct and its embedded
audience, and accounting for the linguistic construction of social relationships
(Halliday 2004: 29) - the paper will identify and quantify the most recurrent
metadiscursive features employed in order to maximize engagement of both
teachers and learners. A typology of the most frequent engagement markers and
functions
(Hyland
2005:
53-54; Heino, Tervonen and Tommola 2002) will
showcase the interactional significance
(and verbal realisation) of motivation
discourse in the PPT corpus. The following research question will be addressed:
how do different realisations of engagement within the instructional community
contribute to define the rationale for PPT as a prominent genre in academic
communication?
The interaction between the ideational and interactional features of PPT as an academic
genre will lastly be explored, following a social semiotic approach to multimodal
analysis (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996, 2001), in order to examine the extent to (and
the ways in) which each level contributes in the resemiotization process construing PPT
as an example of synoptic/multi-semiotic textuality (Charles and Ventola 2002: 172).
3
Stefania Consonni
II. MATERIALS
For the purpose of this analysis, a corpus of 32 PPT presentations, recently produced by
different universities in 22 countries (including Europe, Africa, China, India, Russia and
the USA), has been assembled. The Google search engine (KW: “academic motivation
.ppt”) has been used in order to retrieve the documents. Given PPT’s diffusion as the
“most ubiquitous form of digitally assisted demonstration”, aimed at a manifold “socio-
technical assemblage” of audiences (Stark and Paravel 2008: 3), and assuming academic
motivation to be a complex psycho-social phenomenon (Eccles and Wigfield 2002), an
equal number of slideshows targeted to lecturers and to students have been sampled.
The former instruct academic staff on how to inspire intentional learners, stimulate
commitment to attend class and perform well in exams, while the latter train students to
set goals, enhance competence and self-efficacy perception, develop study skills and
autonomous behaviour, etc. Two subcorpora have thus been obtained, contrasting
symmetric
(subcorpus
1) vs. asymmetric
(subcorpus
2) communication contexts,
totalling 1,213 slides and 56,288 words, as can be seen in Table 1.
Table 1. Distribution of materials in the corpus.
Number of slides
Number of words
Subcorpus 1
744
38,254
(Symmetric)
Staff to staff
Subcorpus 2
469
18,034
(Asymmetric)
Staff to students
Total
1,213
56,288
III. METHOD
This study incorporates socio-visual semiotics and metadiscourse analysis. On the
ideational level, a contrastive analysis of the visual communication strategies employed
in the corpus will be carried out, highlighting the different semiotic resources employed
in PPTs in order to convey referential contents, in both symmetric and asymmetric
settings. A multiplicity of visual modes - all of which carrying significant functional
load (Tardy 2005: 320) - can be evidenced to interact simultaneously and synergetically
4
Multimodal literacy in academic environments: PowerPoint as a motivational genre
(Diani 2015: 103) in the corpus. A typology of four semiotic types of visuals will be
organised:
a) the numerical mode, i.e., the quantitative presentation of empirical data via
mathematical formulae and/or such devices as numerical tables (Bertin 2001;
Rowley-Jolivet 2002);
b) the graphical mode, i.e., the presentation of information to be found in graphs,
diagrams, maps and other artefacts based on info-graphical strategies (Bertin
2011), aiming at the conceptual framing and synoptic visualization of
empirical quantities, so as to display information incidence, evidence,
recurrence patterns, etc.;
c) the scriptural or linguistic mode, i.e., the presentation of information using
written verbal language
(Rowley-Jolivet
2000,
2002), pivoting on the
linguistic and argumentative construction of information;
d) the figurative mode, i.e., the presentation of information using visual artefacts
such as photographs, images, webpages, etc. (Rowley-Jolivet 2002, 2004),
which hinge on allusive and affective symbolizations of empirical reality, so
as to elicit emotional responses on the part of the viewer.
It
should be noted that (a) and (b) are monosemic modes, in that, by referring to
empirical quantities in extra-linguistic reality, the meaning of every sign is defined
beforehand, and known prior to (and regardless of) any “observation of the collection of
signs” (Bertin 2011:2). While both mathematics and graphics display high adherence to
empirical phenomena, i.e., they generally tend to be perceived as unambiguous,
objective, neutral and non-culture driven, they differ as to their perceptual structure, for
graphics visually provides instantaneous perception to quantitative phenomena which
would otherwise require longer processing. In the light of this, it is possible to explain
today’s growing need for the visualization of data and information (Friendly 2009;
Tufte 2001). (C) and (d) are instead polysemic modes, because “the meaning of the
individual sign follows and is deduced from consideration of the collection of signs”, so
that “signification becomes subjective and thus debatable” (Bertin 2011: 2).
5
Stefania Consonni
Although the difference between written language and figurative imagery largely
amounts to their appeal to different sensory stimuli (hearing and sight), and to the
different referential and social interactions strategies they employ, both are perceived as
being on the opposite side of the referential spectrum from mathematics and graphics, as
they tend to be considered subjective, biased and culture driven. Although social
semiotics has fully clarified that visual language works on a lexicogrammar of its own,
realizing meanings as linguistic structures do
(Kress
2003, 2010; Kress and Van
Leeuwen 1996, 2001; Van Leeuwen 2004, 2005), and that no human (re)presentation of
extra-linguistic reality is ever without cognitive effects, such perception may have an
explanation. As a matter of fact, while numerical and graphical visuals tend to
naturalize the distance between their semiotic boundaries and the reality they - as signs
- stand for, the scriptural and figurative modes tend to emphasize such hiatus, and to
display their
“rich cultural load”
(Rowley-Jolivet
2000:
4), since in the case of
polysemic codes, the “reading operation takes place between the sign and its meaning”,
whereby ambiguity and subjectivity are brought in the process
(Bertin
2011:
2).
Reading pictures, as well as reading words, actually involves not only construing
meanings from what we see/read, but also from what we know (Kostelnick 1993: 244),
which makes both operations overtly cognitive in nature. Figure
1 offers a
schematization of the semiotic modes along the (perceived) referential continuum.
Figure 1. The four semiotic modes along the referential continuum.
The present analysis will account for the proportions, functions and variation patterns of
numerical, graphical, scriptural and figurative slides in both PPT subcorpora. The
cognitive interplay among all types can, as a matter of fact, provide an ideational picture
of PPT as an integration code (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2004) hinging on semiotic
spanning processes among concurrent co-textual modes (Charles and Ventola 2002).
6
Multimodal literacy in academic environments: PowerPoint as a motivational genre
On the interpersonal level, a microscopic bottom-up linguistic analysis will be carried
out - within the scriptural slides of both PPT subcorpora - in order to identify and
quantify the most recurrent interaction-oriented metadiscourse features creating
engagement effects with readers/viewers. A typology of engagement markers (Hyland
2005: 53-54; Heino, Tommola and Tervonen 2002; Vassileva 2002; Webber 2002,
2005) will be organised and discussed, accounting for the verbal realizations of
motivation discourse:
a)
READER PRONOUNS (you, your, yourself), i.e., direct appeals to the audience
embedded in presentations, which are highly expected to develop a sense of
meanings being specifically produced for them;
b)
COMMUNITY PRONOUNS (inclusive we, our, ourselves), i.e., appeals to an
integrated educational community, in which a sense of togetherness and
commonality is built;
c)
QUESTIONS, i.e., structures positing meanings interrogatively rather than
assertively, covering doubts the audience may have on specific aspects,
suggesting or anticipating a cognitive gap that the presentation will deal with,
signalling “queries in need of reply, interpretation, and conclusion” (Soler 2007:
100);
d)
IMPERATIVES, i.e., directive structures conveying do’s and don’ts to be
implemented;
e)
OBLIGATION, or compulsion, modals (should, must, have to, need to), i.e.,
modals implying “to a greater or lesser extent, that the speaker is advocating a
certain form of behaviour” from the part of the audience (Quirk and Greenbaum
1990/2008: 68).
The proportions, functions and variation patterns among the five types of engagement
markers and between the subcorpora will be discussed, in order to evidence the ways in
which two different segments of a discourse community are targeted by specific
interactional resources and pragmatic strategies.
7
Stefania Consonni
IV. RESULTS
IV.1. Ideational level
Table 2 provides a breakdown of the semiotic types of slides (numerical, graphical,
scriptural and figurative) to be found in each PPT presentation, and in each subcorpus.
Table 2. Semiotic modes in PPT presentations: variations between subcorpora
PPT
No. SLIDES
AVG.
NUMERICAL
GRAPHICAL
SCRIPTURAL
FIGURATIVE
SUBCORPUS 1: symmetric context (staff to staff)
01
29
3
1
25
0
02
48
5
7
35
1
03
35
0
3
18
14
04
40
0
9
30
1
05
25
2
2
21
0
06
26
3
5
18
0
07
48
0
0
45
3
08
24
0
2
18
4
46,5
09
35
0
1
33
1
10
28
0
2
25
0
11
65
0
3
58
4
12
18
0
1
17
0
13
72
0
28
41
3
14
21
0
0
21
0
15
102
0
1
86
15
16
128
0
4
105
19
Tot. SUBCORPUS1: 744
13 (1,8%)
69 (9,3%)
596 (80,1%)
65 (8,8%)
SUBCORPUS 2: asymmetric context (staff to students)
17
61
0
7
18
36
18
24
0
2
18
4
19
28
0
0
11
17
20
21
0
0
21
0
21
28
0
2
25
1
22
37
0
0
10
17
23
34
0
3
23
8
29,3
24
9
0
0
5
4
25
20
2
4
14
0
26
22
0
1
19
2
27
25
1
0
16
8
28
25
0
7
10
8
29
21
0
0
16
5
30
15
0
0
8
7
21
42
0
22
20
0
32
57
0
6
49
2
Tot. SUBCORPUS 2: 469
3 (0,7%)
54 (11,5%)
283 (60,4%)
119 (25,4%)
8
Multimodal literacy in academic environments: PowerPoint as a motivational genre
The typology has been organized following the referential continuum in Figure 1. Beside
the disparity in the total (744 vs. 469), and in the average number of slides (46,5 vs.
29,3) in the subcorpora - which could be explained in terms of the different attention
span and literacy standards to be expected from an expert vs. student audience - the table
evidences some remarkable variations among the semiotic modes.
Numerical slides, presenting empirical reality via quantitative tables and formulae,
seldom occur in both subcorpora (1,8% in subcorpus 1 and 0,7% in subcorpus 2). Their
typical function is to provide figures as empirical, or scientific, evidence to what is being
discussed in the presentation, as is shown for instance in Figure 2 (Williams 2013, from
subcorpus 1), informing lecturers about the statistical significance of typical operant
conditioning measures. Given that the pragmatic purpose of the PPT corpus in
consideration is to motivate people, whatever their role in the educational process, it is
not surprising that numerical slides should appear as the least frequent mode: as a highly
discipline-specific type of visual, they can perform gate-keeping functions with respect
to the lay audience, thus producing ostracism and exclusion effects (Kostelnick 1993:
250).
Figure 2. Numerical slide (Williams 2013)
A fairly similar trend is shown in both subcorpora by another token of highly specialized
visual communication: amounting to 9,3% of subcorpus 1 and 11,5% of subcorpus 2,
graphical slides are represented by diagrams, charts, maps and other data visualization
devices, which present extra-linguistic reality by means of picturing relevant numerical
9
Stefania Consonni
quantities. Although the graphical portrayal of quantitative information may be
perceived as an epistemologically neutral operation, one which does not interfere with
the objective rendering of reality as it is, outside of any semiotic system, this is merely
the effect of epistemic and social naturalization. A graph, for instance, is designed in
order to show evidence, emphasize relevance of information, frame significant data, etc.
Despite its monosemic character, it is in itself a cognitive operation, entailing a certain
degree of interpretation of extra-textual reality. The reading of empirical data through
patterns is easier to perceive in visual rather than in numerical (or textual) form, because
of the highly informative
- and claim-making
- potential of info-graphical
compositional knowledge. This makes the graphical mode an optimal resource for the
coding of topological meanings in computational terms (Rowley-Jolivet 2000: 6), and a
most effective strategy in discipline-oriented professional visualization, one that is also
deeply linked to the epistemology of the disciplinary field in which such visuals are
produced (ibid.). In both PPT subcorpora under examination, graphical slides have this
function, as can be seen in Figure 3 (Mertz 2013). This graphical slide from subcorpus 2
shows students how to develop leadership skills by visualizing the quantitative
relationship between task- (or individual-)focused behaviour and social (or supportive)
behaviour.
Figure 3. Graphical slide (Mertz 2013)
Opposite trends are instead shown by the two most frequent semiotic modes in both
subcorpora, namely, the polysemic ones: linguistic slides amount to 80,1% of subcorpus
10
Multimodal literacy in academic environments: PowerPoint as a motivational genre
1 vs. 60,4% of subcorpus 2, while figurative slides represent 8,8% of subcorpus 1 vs.
25,4% in subcorpus 2. A closer look at the data reveals that approximately twice as
many scriptural slides can be found in subcorpus 1 (596) than in subcorpus 2 (283),
while the reverse applies to figurative slides (119 in subcorpus 2 vs. 65 in subcorpus 1).
This seems to suggest that in staff-to-staff presentations, when it comes to the preferred
strategy for structuring ideational contents, especially when typological meanings are
involved, words are expected to be more effective than pictures: that is, when targeting
the logical and argumentative competence of academic staff, the verbal and linguistic
construction of information prevails, as can for instance be inferred from Figure 4
(Wood 2017, from subcorpus 1), explaining a researcher’s key findings in psycho-
cognitive pedagogy.
Figure 4. Scriptural slide (Wood 2017)
Conversely, the dominant mode in asymmetric presentations is the allusive, affective
and persuasive representation of polysemic visuals. Figurative language is preferred
when an emotional response - which is at the foundation of self-motivation processes
(Clark 2003) - is being elicited, as can be inferred from Figure 5 (Salama 2014, from
subcorpus 2), featuring a portrait of what motivation and team work may look like, in
the shape of an inspiring illustration of social-supportive behaviour. Being endowed with
a high degree of iconicity, i.e., a complex referential load, which makes signification a
subjectively biased operation, calling for disambiguation from the part of the viewer in
order to be fully understood, figurative imagery pivots on the emotional response of the
11
Stefania Consonni
audience, who is engaged in complementing the allusive stimuli offered by the visuals
with personal meanings. For this reason, figurative visuals are typical of advertising
language, for their main function is a persuasive one (Rowley-Jolivet 2002: 30). On the
contrary, specialized visuals such as graphical devices, which are typical of scientific
language, have a highly eidetic potential, i.e., they are endowed with predetermined
discipline-specific informational meanings, which are required for such visuals to be
understood at all. While graphical visuals are monosemic, eidetic and stylised, and
perform an informative and argumentative function, figurative visuals are polysemic,
iconic and allusive, and have a persuasive and promotional function.
Figure 5. Figurative slide (Salama, 2014)
The proportions of figurative and linguistic slides within each PPT subcorpus can be
further observed in Charts 1 and 2. Symmetric contexts display nearly the same amount
of graphical and figurative slides, while the figurative vs. scriptural ratio is nearly 1:10
(see Chart 1). In asymmetric contexts, there are twice as many figurative than graphical
slides, while the figurative vs. scriptural increases to approximately 1:2 (see Chart 2).
12
Multimodal literacy in academic environments: PowerPoint as a motivational genre
Chart 1. Semiotic modes in subcorpus 1
Chart 2. Semiotic modes in subcorpus 2
With respect to such tendencies, it can be observed that different pragmatic functions are
associated with the discursive modes of the subcorpora (Sala 2008: 16). This appears to
be a more convincing explanation than the alleged objectivity of verbal language vs. the
subjective bias of visual language. Being targeted to the verbal literacy skills expected
from academic staff, the PPT presentations in subcorpus
1 obey a predominantly
informativeand argumentative function, as can easily be expected in expert-to-expert
13
Stefania Consonni
disciplinary communication, where “knowledge production is carried out and codified”
in writing (Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995: 1). On the contrary, addressing the visual
literacy skills of students, and being meant to elicit a psychological response from them
as a trigger to better self-management strategies, the presentations in subcorpus 2 exploit
the attractiveness of visual display and obey a persuasive and promotional function.
Both discursive modes - the verbal/argumentative and the visual/persuasive
- are
reflected in the rationale for PPT as a leading academic genre, in both research and
instructional settings. On the one hand, in symmetric contexts, the cognitive architecture
and impact of what is considered the most typical “conferencing product” (Campagna
2009: 387) is granted by the functional collaboration between verbal (i.e., running text)
and visual discourse formulations (i.e., use of visuals, formatting devices, etc.; Virbel et
al.
1999: 35). The synchronous visual-cum-verbal progression (Rowley-Jolivet 2000:
13) is as a matter of fact perceived and decoded as an integrated whole by the audience.
Conversely, in asymmetric contexts, the multi-literacy stimuli offered by PPT can be
said to be effective as concerns the transfer of contents from experts to learners:
evidence from social and behavioural sciences (Kosslyn et al. 2012; Paoletti et al. 2012)
shows that PPT’s conflation of lexico-syntactical and visual structures tends to be
preferred by students over traditional media (such as blackboards or transparencies), in
that it facilitates and strengthens information processing operations, to such an extent
that students tend to tag themselves as
“visual learners”
(Amare 2006: 302). By
stimulating the perception and retention of materials, PPT textuality both enhances
students’ self-efficacy beliefs (Susskind 2005: 211) and boosts their motivation towards
learning
(Corbeil
2007; Ilter
2009; Lari
2014; Oommen
2012; Wang
2011).
Interestingly, motivation seems to emerge from the investigated PPT corpus as a psycho-
social outcome of multi-semiotic textuality.
IV.2. Interpersonal level
Table 3 provides a breakdown of the most recurrent metadiscursive resources to be
found in the linguistic slides of both subcorpora, and meant to elicit engagement and
commitment from the part of the audience embedded in PPT presentations. Data are
presented in normalized figures (per 10,000 words). It can clearly be seen that there is a
14
Multimodal literacy in academic environments: PowerPoint as a motivational genre
much higher frequency of engagement markers in subcorpus 2 than in subcorpus 1
(542,86 vs. 325,97). Although, as shown in Table 2, subcorpus 2 has approximately half
as many scriptural slides as subcorpus 1 (283 vs. 596), the average frequency of markers
in scriptural slides is over twice as high in subcorpus 2 (45,23) than in subcorpus 1
(20,37). Motivational discourse addressing students seems in fact more in need of
specific linguistic resources in order to signal the inclusion of readers as discourse
participants, emphasising on the one hand commonality - as is the case of the inclusive
pronouns we, us, our, ourselves
- and on the other the individuality of each
reader/viewer, who needs to be constantly made aware (by means of reader pronouns
such as you, your, yourself) of being the presentation’s designed addressee and
beneficiary.
Table 3. Engagement markers in PPT presentations (normalized frequency per 10,000 words): variations
between subcorpora
PPT
No.
AVG.
READER
COMMUNITY
QUESTIONS
IMPERATIVES
OBLIGATION
ENGAGEMENT
PRONOUNS
PRONOUNS
MODALS
MARKERS
(you, your,
(we, us, our,
(should, must,
yourself)
ourselves)
have to, need
to)
SUBCORPUS 1: symmetric context (staff to staff)
01
3,66
0
2,35
1,04
0
0,26
02
3,92
0,26
1,82
1,04
0
0,78
03
16,99
3,66
0,26
6,53
6,53
0
04
4,44
1,56
0,26
2,61
0
0
05
7,05
0,26
0
6,79
0
0
06
9,41
0,26
0
0,78
7,58
0,78
07
44,7
9,14
1,04
1,82
32,67
0
08
10,19
1,82
0,52
0,78
6,79
0,26
20,37
09
12,80
2,35
0
2,61
7,05
0,78
10
7,05
3,39
2,35
1,3
0
0
11
60,64
27,97
4,44
8,88
18,82
0,52
12
12,28
5,48
2,09
1,3
3,39
0
13
6,79
0,26
0
6,53
0
0
14
3,92
0
0
0
2,35
1,56
15
48,88
10,19
2,09
14,37
20,91
1,30
16
73,19
23
14,37
17,51
17,25
1,04
Tot. SUBCORPUS 1: 325,97
89,66
31,63
73,97
123,38
7,32
15
Stefania Consonni
SUBCORPUS 2: asymmetric context (staff to students)
17
28,27
8,87
0,55
10,53
8,31
0
18
49,35
28,27
1,66
13,3
5,5
0,55
19
37,7
15,52
0
2,21
18,85
1,1
20
12,75
6,65
2,21
3,88
0
0
21
75,41
19,4
1,66
23,28
23,84
7,2
22
42,69
28,83
3,88
1,66
8,31
0
23
21,62
9,42
1,1
1,1
9,98
0
45,23
24
28,27
18,29
0,55
0,55
7,76
1,1
25
29,38
16,63
0,55
7,76
4,43
0
26
29,38
13,3
1,1
7,76
7,2
0
27
8,87
7,2
0
1,66
0
0
28
8,87
2,21
0
0,55
5,5
0,55
29
32,16
14,41
2,77
3,88
9,98
1,1
30
63,76
34,93
13,86
5,5
8,87
0,55
31
14,97
6,09
1,1
6,65
1,1
0
32
59,33
13,3
3,32
12,19
25,5
4,99
Tot. SUBCORPUS 2: 542,86
243,43
34,38
102,58
145,28
17,19
The preferred interactional features in both subcorpora are reader pronouns and
imperatives, albeit in inverted proportions. While imperatives are the most widely used
category in subcorpus 1 (123,38), followed by reader pronouns (89,66), reader pronouns
rank first in subcorpus 2 (243,43), followed by imperatives (145,28). The proportions
within each subcorpus can be further observed in Charts 3 and 4. Symmetric contexts
show a you vs. we ratio of 3:1, while the imperative vs. you ratio is approximately 4:3
(see Chart 3); in asymmetric contexts, the you vs. we ratio increases to 7:1, while the
imperative vs. you ratio declines to 3:5 (see Chart 4). This seems to indicate that
community pronouns, emphasising common knowledge or experience, or advocating
team spirit
(Vassileva
2002:
270), are a favourite interactional resource when
motivation discourse is meant for academic staff, whereas reader pronouns, stressing
individual worth and thus boosting individual effort, are a typical resource when
students are being addressed.
16
Multimodal literacy in academic environments: PowerPoint as a motivational genre
Chart 3. Engagement markers in subcorpus 1 (normalized frequency per 10,000 words)
Chart 4. Engagement markers in subcorpus 2 (normalized frequency per 10,000 words)
The charts also reveal information about the third preferred resource for engagement in
the PPT corpus, i.e., questions. While asymmetric contexts use way less than half as
many questions as reader pronouns (102,58 vs. 243,43), in symmetric contexts the
proportion significantly changes to approximately four interrogative structures every
five reader pronouns (73,97 vs. 89,66). Questions are typical of PPT’s conventionalized
17
Stefania Consonni
cognitive style (Tufte 2003), and of PPT as an “open-for-discussion” tool (Webber
2002) for communicating state-of-the-art knowledge to an audience who is expected to
react, either asking questions or producing comments. As can be seen in Figure 6
(Landis 2005, from subcorpus 1), the typical PPT slide follows an add-on, theme-rheme
(or gap-filler) information sequence, eliciting the reader/viewer’s curiosity via the
heading, and providing answers in the body text (usually organized through bullet
points). If slides in general are organized in gap-filler slots, in the case of subcorpus 1
this seems to match the possible informational request of an expert audience, who,
being engaged by a possible gap in their knowledge system, will probably look forward
to developing new educational protocols. In the case of a student audience, instead,
PPT’s argumentative structure tends to be perceived as facilitating the understanding
and retention of instructional materials (Susskind 2005: 204). In both contexts, the use
of interrogative structures can be said to function as an interactional booster of standard
PPT gap-filler argumentative patterns.
Figure 6. Typical question slide (Landis 2005)
Overall, results on the interpersonal level seem to confirm that different engagement
strategies are needed in different communicative situations. The behaviour of
imperatives and questions in the subcorpora seems in particular to substantiate what was
hypothesized at the ideational level
(cf. IV.1 above). Metadiscursive resources
18
Multimodal literacy in academic environments: PowerPoint as a motivational genre
complement the verbal and argumentative tenor of subcorpus 1 with explanatory and
normative features: as a matter of fact, symmetric presentations frequently anticipate
and clarify possible cognitive gaps from the part of lecturers, as well as establish the
do’s and don’ts of motivating students. Questions and imperatives are not perceived
here as Face Threatening Acts
(Goffman
1967), for subcorpus
1 addresses a
professional audience, expecting explicit instructions and caveats from PPTs. The visual
and persuasive tenor of subcorpus
2, on the contrary, needs differently cogent
interactional resources, for its purpose is to enthuse individuals to commit to volitional
learning - which involves the massive use of reader pronouns and of figurative imagery
(as shown in IV.1). Imperatives also frequently occur in subcorpus 2. Here, however,
directives tend to be packaged in specific argumentative sections within each PPT
presentation (as can be seen in Figure 7, Holmes 2013, from subcorpus 2), do’s and
don’ts sections which students may decide not to access in case they do not wish to take
specific advice. Such strategic hedging of imperatives in subcorpus 2 contributes to
dismantle the face-threatening potential of directives, while keeping the potential
benefits of instructional discourse active
IV. CONCLUDING REMARKS
By bridging socio-visual semiotics and metadiscourse analysis, this study has
investigated the ideational and interpersonal strategies structuring PPT as a resourceful
genre for the implementation of motivation strategies in academic environments.
Results from multimodal analysis have shown, on the ideational level, that the
construction of informative meanings in PPTs hinges on the intersemiotic translation of
different modes
(Jakobson 1959: 233), i.e., the interaction and integration of the
numerical, graphical, scriptural, and figurative mode. The coexistence of four semiotic
systems, interacting with one another along the referential continuum and activating
across different pragmatic purposes and communicative settings, construes PPT as an
integration code among a plurality of literacy practices, combining and synergizing
monosemic and polysemic systems of signification (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2001). A
synoptic screen genre
(Charles and Ventola
2002:
172), the PPT slideshow is
characterized by a combination of multi-semiotic resources constituting a whole and
19
Stefania Consonni
coherent communicative act (Degano 2012), both in research and pedagogical settings.
Meaning-making processes are distributed, and constantly resemiotized (Iedema 2001),
across all modes, accommodating flexible functional variation patterns, as evidenced by
the contrastive analysis between the subcorpora. The flexibility with which each
semiotic mode can modulate itself within the same communicative event suggests PPT
as a hybrid “inscribed genre”, that is, a mainly (albeit not exclusively) written genre
combining “language, image, and graphics in an integrated whole” (Van Leeuwen 2004:
10).
Such hybridity explains PPT’s efficacy in academic discourse, with respect to both
informative and argumentative (Diani 2015) and persuasive and promotional functions
(Busà 2010). In this respect, results on the ideational level seem to confirm - in line
with (and in the light of) recent linguistic and psycho-pedagogical research (Bellés-
Fortuño and Ollero 2015; Bellés-Calvera and Bellés-Fortuño 2018; Dörnyei 2001) -
that PPT may positively influence students’ task-focused and social supportive
behaviour. Both effects can impact the building of a unified image of self-confidence,
and the optimisation of students’ study skills and general organisation. Motivation
seems therefore to be an interestingly psycho-social and discursive phenomenon.
Results from metadiscourse analysis (and on the interpersonal level) have shown how
motivational PPTs hinge on a typology of interactional markers - namely, reader and
community pronouns, imperatives, and questions - whose function is to maximize
engagement and commitment from the part of both teachers and learners. Engagement
markers are the main linguistic manifestation of motivation discourse in the PPT corpus,
and, as in the case of the abovementioned four semiotic modes, they also evidence
functional variation patterns along different pragmatic purposes and communicative
contexts. Interactional outcomes of motivation discourse can encompass a range of
functions, from explanatory to normative to emotional ones, depending on the
proportions among the various types of metadiscourse used in the subcorpora, and
complementing the argumentative efficacy of PPT as a leading genre in academic
contexts. The case of questions and imperatives seems in particular to highlight the high
potential for dialogical communication, and for the eliciting of various degrees of
commitment on the part of the reader, which is typical of PPT’s standard logical
structure, usually built on gap-filler (or theme-theme) information sequences. Reader
20
Multimodal literacy in academic environments: PowerPoint as a motivational genre
and community pronouns also seem a typical resource of PPT as a hybrid “inscribed
genre” (Van Leeuwen 2004: 10), whereby repeated appeals to individual readers and the
pedagogical community - also crucial in the process of motivating both oneself and
others - are accommodated by the multi-semiotic affordances of the genre.
In conclusion, this paper has aimed to suggest that the motivational impact of PPT in a
constructivist academic environment can be found at both the ideational and the
interpersonal level. It is distributed across four signification systems, stemming in
different ways from the ideational expression of empirical experience offered by various
types of visuals (such as, for instance, graphical devices and/or figurative imagery), as
well as from the linguistic construction of dialogical roles between academic staff and
students in the communication of experiential meanings (as is the case of metadiscourse
markers). Multimodal literacy can therefore contribute, on the one hand, to the
development of committed, autonomous and creative behaviour on the part of
individual students, and, on the other, to the reinforcement of social processes of
“communication and collaboration among students” as well as between students and
teachers (Bellés-Calvera and Bellés-Fortuño 2018: 107). In the light of the above,
potential implications of the present study may include extending the analysis to the
third metafunction Systemic Functional Grammar metafunction (Halliday 2002, 2004).
Researching PPT as a fully trifunctional language may help further research focus on
the ways
- also including
“performative” aspects of PPT, such as kinesic and
paralinguistic features (Van Leeuwen 2004: 10) - in which the trifunctional load is
worked out among the different resources in the multi-semiotic mix.
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Stefania Consonni
Received: 10 April 2018
Accepted: 23 July 2018
Cite this article as:
Consonni, Stefania 2018. “Multimodal literacy in academic environments: PowerPoint as a
motivational genre”. Language Value 10 (1), 1-28. Jaume I University ePress: Castelló, Spain.
http://www.e-revistes.uji.es/languagevalue.
ISSN 1989-7103
Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors
28
Language Value
November 2018, Volume 10, Number 1 pp. 29-44
ISSN 1989-7103
PowerPoint presentations in the classroom: Re-evaluating the
genre
Larissa D’Angelo
Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures
University of Bergamo, Italy
ABSTRACT
Since the late 1990s, Microsoft PowerPoint has become the expected presentation genre. However,
several studies have demonstrated its many faults, such as the pre-formatted construction of discourse
leading to the abuse of bullet point presentations, the limited format and size of slides that support
minimum content and the ever-present risk of overwhelming viewers with too much text or data (Alley
2003, 2004, Robertshaw 2004, Gottlieb 1985, Keller 2003, Tufte 2003). Taking into consideration how
the linguistic and visual elements, as well as the design and text organizations found in PowerPoint
presentations have evolved in the last 20 years, the present paper analyses the negative effects that the
default slide structure provided by Microsoft PPT, consisting of topic-subtopics and bullet points, has on
the audience. The paper will then demonstrate the positive learning effects that the assertion evidence
structure has on readers. The different retaining degree of three groups of undergraduate students are
tested, after having exposed them to PPTs applying phrase headlines, phrase headlines and images or the
assertion evidence structure.
Keywords: PPT, PowerPoint, PowerPoint presentation, multimodality, multimodal genre, multimedia
design
I. INTRODUCTION
In today’s academic world, PowerPoint presentations have become increasingly
common not only in the hard sciences but also in the humanities, showing how the fast-
paced, visually attractive data-driven presentations typical of marketing and business
have invaded even the most traditional settings. As Tufte (2009) confirms, “slideware -
computer programs for presentations
- is everywhere: in business settings, in
government bureaucracies, even in our schools and universities, where several hundred
million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint are generating trillions of slides each year.”
Indeed, if the conventional method of presenting research results at conferences,
workshops and even university lessons was to stand in front of an audience reading a
paper, scribbling on lucid or writing formulas on a blackboard, today lectures have been
Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors
29
Larissa D’Angelo
enriched with images, colour and sometimes even music and videos thanks to new,
enhanced software. As Myers (2003: 3) recognises,
[…] anyone who walks around a university campus today will soon be aware that academic
discourse is not just about words. There are colour-illustrated textbooks, videos, and interactive
whiteboards boards in teaching sciences, materials and actions in labs, lectures and
demonstrations, PowerPoint presentations in university lectures, web pages as support for
teaching and publicity, and music signalling the scientific in television documentaries.
PowerPoint as a multimedia tool is used not within University walls but also by primary
school teachers teaching K-12 grades (Martin and Carr, 2015). The software is the most
utilized tool and is used daily to introduce new topics, explain concepts and presumably
enhance lessons by integrating multimodal exercises (2015: 10-11). Among a number of
multimedia software available, enabling them to create multimodal material for K-12
students, teachers still choose first and foremost PowerPoint, followed by Vimeo,
Youtube, Camtasia, Animoto, Prezi and xtranormal (2015: 8). Why has this surplus of
multimodal instruments invaded the academic world so strongly in the past few years?
As Myers (2003: 3) states, science has always been multi-modal; historians have shown
that it is our own textual bias that cuts out the elements of the visual and the performed
from past scientific practice (Gross et al. 2002). But it could be that new technologies
make it easier to carry non-verbal elements from medium to medium, and easier to
interweave different modes.
The effects of technology on academic discourse are numerous and sometimes
insidious, changing what were once ‘traditional genres’ such as the research article and
the lecture into multimodal genres, requiring new preparation and delivery skills and a
new approach to genre analysis. Myers (2000: 184) offers a particularly rich and
illuminating discussion of the intersection of technology and genre in which he
discusses the effects of PowerPoint on his own lecture preparation, delivery, and
reception. After dealing with the more obvious consequences, such as the ‘bulletization’
of information, he goes on to write:
[…] the written text, produced by the machine, has become the star; I am reduced to an unseen
voiceover of my own lectures. That may not matter in a business setting, where different people
30
PowerPoint presentations in the classroom: Re-evaluating the genre
from sales or personnel may be called upon to speak the same words. But for a university
lecturer, it marks a shift in what Goffman (1981) called footing; that is, I am seen as the animator
rather than the source of the utterance. Instead of my speaking with the aid of some visual
device, the text is speaking with my aid.
Swales (2004: 7) reinforces Myers’ account of technological impact by stating that
certain multimodal genres, such as the PowerPoint, inevitably blur the boundaries
between the academic and the commercial, and between the written and the visual.
Along the same lines, Rowley-Jolivet
(2001) observes that the frequent use of
photographs in Conference Presentations (hereinafter CP) reinforces the sense that these
presentations often deal with early-stage, breaking-news research. Given the CP time
pressures, the idea that “a picture is worth a thousand words” has clearly come to the
fore (Swales 2004: 199). For this reason, visual presentation and graphics in conference
PowerPoint presentations and handouts have become vital to outline a piece of work in
a form that is easily assimilated and stimulates interest and discussion (Matthews 1990,
Tufte 1990).
How has the genre of oral presentations evolved through the years and how is it that
PowerPoint invaded university classrooms and conference venues? More importantly,
how does PowerPoint’s traditional format modify academic discourse? Long before
today's presentation programs, such as Microsoft PowerPoint, OpenOffice.org, Impress
or Apple iWork Keynote, presentations at companies such as IBM and in the military
used bullet lists shown by overhead projectors. However, the format has become
omnipresent as PowerPoint, which was created in 1984 and later acquired by Microsoft,
spread around the world. This spoken/written genre has evolved together with
technology and its popularity has raised several debates concerning its common practice
use at conferences (Keller 2004, Parker 2001, Schwartz 2003).
Visual aids and computer presentations can enhance speaker credibility and persuasion,
increase audience interest, focus audience attention, and aid retention of key
points/content, although the exact opposite is also true when visual aids and computer
presentations are used poorly by a speaker (Stoner 2009). In fact, presentation programs
may help speakers organize their talks, but what is convenient for the speaker might be
detrimental to both content and audience. The typical PowerPoint style suggested by the
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Larissa D’Angelo
program itself and the ready-made templates available to Microsoft users routinely
disrupt, dominate, and trivialize content, elevating format over content and betraying an
attitude of commercialism (Tufte 2009).
Since the 1980s, Gottlieb (1984) and others (Alley 2003, Atkinson 2005, Doumont
2005, Gaudelli et al. 2009, Keedy 1982) have rejected phrase headlines, responsible for
unclear main assertions and lack of connections in the evidence, and have advocated the
assertion-evidence structure, which features a sentence-assertion headline supported by
visual evidence (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. PPT slide employing the assertion-evidence structure.
How does the assertion-evidence structure work? When a presentation slide appears
before the audience, the audience immediately turns to it and tries to decipher its
contents and purpose. The assertion-evidence structure helps the audience quickly
understand and retain the contents of a slide by providing a sentence headline, which
orients the audience to the purpose of the slide; the audience can then turn its attention
back to the presenter. Once the presenter has made clear what the main message of the
slide is, the presenter should support that assertion primarily with images and with
words where needed. The reasoning for this guideline is that images, if well-conceived,
can communicate information much more quickly to the audience than blocks of text
can.
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PowerPoint presentations in the classroom: Re-evaluating the genre
Using a sentence headline is not the norm in scientific presentations
(Alley and
Robertshaw 2004). In fact, because thousands of presentations typically use phrase
headlines (or no headlines at all), the assertion-evidence structure goes against what is
most often seen and recommended. Phrase headlines in presentation slides in fact,
should be avoided because they seem to reduce the personal connections between the
presenter and audience, thus disturbing the flow of information and reducing the
persuasive force of the message.
Because presentation slides reduce the personal connections between the presenter and
audience, presenters have to be critical thinkers about the reader-oriented strategies
employed and, most of all, when this academic genre is appropriate and when it is not
(Alley 2003).
Taking into consideration how the linguistic and visual elements, as well as the design
and text organizations found in PowerPoint presentations have evolved in the last 20
years, the present paper analyses the negative effects that the default slide structure
provided by Microsoft PPT, consisting of topic-subtopics and bullet points, has on the
audience. On the other hand, the paper will demonstrate the positive learning effects
that the assertion evidence structure has on readers. More specifically, the different
retaining degree of three groups of undergraduate students will be tested, after having
exposed them to PPTs applying phrase headlines, phrase headlines and images or the
assertion evidence structure.
II. METHODOLOGY
Two main methods for presenting data will be taken into consideration and analysed
hereafter: on the one hand the standard method for presenting information through the
projection of data in bullet-style and/or graphical formats i.e. phrase headlines, on the
other hand the assertion-evidence structure, which is gradually gaining acceptance in the
hard sciences.
To ascertain the positive or negative effects of these two different types of PPT formats
on the audience and on the university student population in particular, three groups of
undergraduate students attending the University of Bergamo between October 2015 and
December 2017 have been selected and exposed to the same subject matter, which was
33
Larissa D’Angelo
however presented in different forms (see Table 1). The first group, counting 58
students, served as the control group and was exposed to a 30-hour module, entitled
‘The language of written advertisements in English’, which took place in the first
semester of the academic year 2015/16 and was addressed to first year students enrolled
in the Intercultural Communication for Co-operation and Business undergraduate
degree programme. The control group was exposed to lessons utilizing PPT
presentations, which employed “bullet style” phrases, interspersed with graphs and
chunks of text. The second group counted
45 students enrolled in the same
undergraduate degree programme and exposed to the same 30-hour module, which took
place the following academic year, although in this case, relevant illustrations were
added to text-only presentation materials. The third group counted 62 students, enrolled
in the same degree programme as the previous two groups of students and attending the
same course, although the 30-hour module took place, in this case, in the first semester
of the academic year 2017/18. The latter batch of students was exposed to carefully re-
designed slides organized according to the assertion-evidence structure (Figure 1).
Table 1. Tests conducted and group characteristics
Group
Semester
Academic
Number
Number
Material used
Year
of
of course
students
hours
1
1st
2015/2016
58
30
Topic-subtopic slide design, “bullet style”
phrases with graphs and chunks of text
2
2nd
2016/2017
45
30
Topic-subtopic slide design, “bullet style”
phrases with graphs, chunks of text and
illustrations
3
1st
2017/2018
62
30
PPT slides following the assertion-
evidence structure
All the students selected for the research had an attendance rate of at least 90%, had all
studied English for at least five years before the beginning of the course, and reached a
certified B1 level of English. All students were administered the same multiple-choice
test on the last day of the course and were given 30 minutes to complete the task.
Students were administered the test without notice so as to measure the retention of the
34
PowerPoint presentations in the classroom: Re-evaluating the genre
material to which they had been exposed over the previous
3 months, without
preparation.
The test featured 20 questions focusing on the content of the course and 5 different
answers were provided for each question. The results obtained by the second and third
group were compared with the results obtained by the control group and the relevant
statistics were drawn, demonstrating the positive effects of adding relevant images to
PPT slides and using the assertion-evidence structure.
III. RESULTS
The investigation described in this section relies heavily on the generative theory of
multimedia design (Mayer 2001). This theory is based on the view of learning as
knowledge construction, the idea that learner’s actively build mental representations
based on what is presented and what they already know. It therefore advocates that
materials that facilitate selection, organization, and integration of to-be-learned
information are of benefit in designed instruction.
The following hypotheses have been tested on three groups of non-native undergraduate
students, following a 30-hour module in English:
1. By simply adding relevant illustrations to text-only presentation materials,
retention increases;
2. People comprehend and retain better without extraneous information (learning
material must be simplified, removing everything that isn’t directly related to the
discussion).
As Table 2 shows, the first group of students, which served as the control group for the
research, scored an average of 68% on the final test. These students were exposed to
learning material which consisted mainly in PPT slides employing “bullet style”
phrases, interspersed with graphs and chunks of text. A limited number of images
were shown in PPT slides and numerous references were instead made to the textbook
adopted for the course.
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Larissa D’Angelo
Table 2. Retention increase with different PPT layouts
Group
Material provided
Average score on
Retention
test (%)
increase (%)
1 (control group)
Mainly text-only PPT slides
68%
-
2
PPT slides with text and images
87%
+19%
3
PPT slides displaying the assertion-
94%
+26%
evidence structure.
The second group of students was exposed to the same PPT slides, to which relevant
images were added. Unlike the learning material provided to the previous group, in this
case, almost every slide included at least one picture relevant to the subject matter. At
the end of the course these students scored 87% on the test given, demonstrating that
just by adding relevant illustrations to text-only presentations, retention increased by
19%.
The third group of students were exposed to carefully re-designed PPT slides,
employing the assertion evidence structure. Learning material was simplified, removing
everything that was not directly related to the discussion and a sentence headline was
used, followed by a clear picture or simplified graph, reinforcing and/or complementing
the information given in the headline. Sentence headlines were no longer than two lines
so as to avoid heavy chunks of text and the total number of slides provided was less
numerous, so that in certain instances information was conveyed only orally and relied
on the rhetorical capabilities of the presenter. The students belonging to this group
scored an average of 94% on the final test, showing that the use of the assertion-
evidence structure increased retention by 26%.
This last finding provides a powerful incentive not only to re-design and re-think the
layout of university course materials, but also to implement the assertion-evidence
principle whenever a transfer of knowledge is required as in academic meetings,
conferences and workshops. It is also a strong incentive to avoid including graphics or
multimedia effects simply for the sake of including them and to incorporate only the
graphics that closely relate to the content, removing all extraneous, distracting details
(Sommers 2008).
36
PowerPoint presentations in the classroom: Re-evaluating the genre
IV. DISCUSSING THE ASSERTION-EVIDENCE STRUCTURE: SWIMMING
AGAINST THE CURRENT
As introduced in the previous sections, since the late 1990s, Microsoft PowerPoint has
become the expected presentation genre, because it is the most commonly pre-installed
software in PCs and Macs alike. The software developed from a culture of slides within
business, government, and military organizations, with the latter particularly fond of
bullet phrases in documentation, long before the introduction of electronic
presentations. In particular, PowerPoint was introduced when the form of
communication began requiring interaction in different forms both horizontally and
vertically within an organization (Pece 2005).
In corporate history, DuPont has been one of the first users of charts and graphs to be
viewed in a special chart-viewing room. This practice was widely copied and what was
“uniquely DuPont” (Orlikowski and Yates 1994) - use of graphs as visual aids -
became more widespread. By the second half of the 20th century, visual aids became
the norm and the pre-processed ‘bullet style’ presentation of information became the
standard rhetorical construction employed in academic and non-academic settings.
The shift from carefully crafted lucid presentations and expensive 35 mm slides to
ready-to-use and widely accessible PPT slides has revolutionized and standardised
rhetoric, deconstructing the art of oratory within University walls (Keller 2004, Parker
2001, Myers 2000, Tufte 2003). Its design forces users to follow a pre-formatted
construction of discourse, encouraging an abuse of bullet point presentations; the format
and size of slides do not support much content and tables as well as graphs, if presented
through a PPT slide, hold very little information and the risk of overwhelming viewers
with too much text or data is ever-present (Alley and Robertshaw 2004, Keller 2003,
Tufte 2003). If these negative aspects were not enough, Tufte (2003) has correctly
underlined that the biggest fault of the software is its tendency to “dilute thought”
(2003:6), encouraging a “generic, superficial, simplistic thinking” (2003: 5). Although it
simplifies the presenter’s task of delivering oral discourse because of its bullet point
style, its design limits and slows down the flow of information; simply reinforcing what
is being said, thus rendering this tool inadequate to for complex, non-linear issues.
37
Larissa D’Angelo
Another fault lies in the quick loss of audience attention because listeners are led to shift
their attention from the speaker to the screen, quickly tuning out the presenter and
concentrating solely on the text. If slides utilize fonts that are not easy to read or they
overwhelm readers with too much text, the ultimate outcome is that viewers, who have
stopped listening, eventually stop reading too, losing all interest in the presentation
because the material shown was not able to trigger an emotional response.
There are however recent studies that present and promote alternative uses of the
software, so that it can be correctly utilized in an educational setting. For example, Lai,
Tsai and Yu (2011) propose a Two-Layer display of information on screens to avoid
overloading students with information. Kumar’s (2013) study supports the position
described above, indicating that students preferred PowerPoint over blackboard-based
lectures, because the “inherent deficiency of each method is compensated by the other.
While blackboard teaching is deficient in showing three dimensional diagrams,
animated videos, and sounds; the same can be demonstrated using a PowerPoint
presentation” (p. 240).
A solution to this dilemma is provided by the assertion-evidence structure utilized with
group 3 in the present study. This structure proposes the use of full sentences instead of
phrase sentences, which are typically fragments of phrases and do not help viewers
comprehend immediately what is being shown in the slide and, most of all, do not
favour retention of the subject matter. Alley and Robertshaw (2004) suggest placing the
sentence headline in the upper-left corner of the slide, so that the audience sees the
headline before anything else on the slide and to favour a quick retention, it should be
no more than two lines long and justified left.
Several good reasons exist for using sentence headlines. One is that a sentence headline
forces the presenter to come to rehearse and carefully select the assertions he or she is
making (Alley 2003, 2004, Alley and Robertshaw 2004, Gottlieb 1985). The presenter
is in a better position to select the best evidence to support those assertions because s/he
has clearly established what the assertions of the presentation are when s/he wrote the
easily-readable headlines to display on the slides. A second reason is that using sentence
headlines makes the set of slides stand-alone better as a set of notes. For instance, if a
slide simply had the headline “Results,” it would not be nearly as helpful to the
38
PowerPoint presentations in the classroom: Re-evaluating the genre
audience two weeks later when viewed as part of a set of notes. The ‘Results’ slide
displaying a short headline, summarizing the main results is much more effective and
useful once notes are re-read at home.
A third reason for the value of sentence headlines is that presentations using sentence
headlines tend to have significantly fewer slides (Alley and Robertshaw 2004), thus
reducing the frenetic pace that weakens so many presentations. The reason for the
reduction in the number of slides is that if the presenter cannot write a sentence for the
slide that states its assertion, the design calls for the elimination of the slide (Alley
2003, Gottlieb 1985).
Once the presenter has established what the main concept of the slide is with the
sentence headline, he or she supports that concept primarily with images and with
words (where needed). Images, if well-conceived, can in fact communicate information
much more quickly to the audience than blocks of text. If a block of text must be
included in a slide, it should be no longer than two lines, including the headline,
because audiences are much more likely to read blocks of text with one or two lines
than longer blocks.
Because audiences are more likely to remember lists of twos, threes, and fours than lists
of fives, sixes, or sevens, lists with more than four items should be avoided. Moreover,
when a long list is presented, the audience sees the length, perhaps reads the first couple
of items, and then tends to give up on the remaining items. When a long list must
necessarily be included in a slide, presenters should then place only the four most
important items from that list onto the slide and reserve the less important items for the
speech (Alley and Robertshaw 2004).
Another useful technique that comes with the use of the assertion-evidence structure is
to be generous in the use of white space, because it prevents a slide from seeming
overcrowded (Hill 2004). White space not only allows the audience to separate the
items in the slide’s body, but also helps viewers find a logical order in which to view
them.
Presenting something following a non-standard PPT layout requires a deep
understanding of the subject matter as bullet point prompts are no longer available.
Therefore, the assertion-evidence structure demands a much greater preparation by the
39
Larissa D’Angelo
presenter than a standard PPT presentation, besides the difficulty of applying changes to
the typography and layout of slides. However, as the previous section demonstrated,
the results of applying this new design are well worth the effort.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
The present research has highlighted the potentialities of presentation software such as
Microsoft PPT, as well as the numerous criticisms this genre has collected in recent
years. PPT slides have become the standard format to present ideas and transfer
knowledge not only in governmental and business settings, but within the academy as
well.
In the humanities, PPT presentations have spread incredibly fast and have become the
norm not only in classrooms but also in academic conferences and seminars. Viewers
have come to expect (and respect) what has been defined as ‘group wall reading’, often
not realizing that PPT slides are not always the best vehicle of information and can
easily become a medium, which hinders communication instead of facilitating it.
There are numerous faults inherent to the software, such as the fact that very little
information can be conveyed on each slide, limiting content to a series of bulleted lists
and fragmented sentences. Microsoft automatically suggests a standard form of
presentation, rich in special effects that can be visually appealing but also unnecessarily
distracting. All these elements allow slides to dominate over the speaker and instead of
being a means to enrich messages, slides become the message itself. The dominance of
projected slides over the speaker often means that presenters forego an important
opportunity to connect with the audience and in many cases the message is lost because
of a lack of clarity, overwhelming information or simply a lack of interest.
Given the numerous drawbacks this software has, why should academics still use it?
Because, as the results of this research have demonstrated, despite its potentially
dangerous features, a PPT - if well used - can become a tremendously effective
communication tool. Because of its multimodal nature, it is capable of combining text,
but also images, graphs, movies and music. If slides are properly reorganized, redundant
text and disturbing special effects eliminated, and images are added to complement the
message, a PPT can become an excellent medium of communication.
40
PowerPoint presentations in the classroom: Re-evaluating the genre
In order to achieve this aim, a presenter must necessarily regain confidence in his/her
oratorical skills, allowing slides to simply enrich and accompany what the presenter has
to say, instead of dominating the presentation with redundant text, lists and graphs,
which are bound to be read aloud, sadly distancing the presenter from the audience.
Making a transition from the now ‘traditional’ slide format, to a format such as the
assertion evidence structure, is not an easy and requires substantial work, a deep
knowledge of the subject matter and most of all, enough confidence to ‘navigate solo’,
not using the software as a mere prompter but as an accompanying and enriching tool.
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Atkinson, C. 2005. Beyond Bullet Points: How to Use Microsoft PowerPoint to Create
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Atkinson, C. 2009. “The Problem with PowerPoint”. BBC NEWS. 19 August 2009.
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Gottlieb, L. 1984. “New-Breed Presentationists Sometimes Closely Collaborate on
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Keller, J. Y. 2004. “Is PowerPoint the Devil?”. Chicago Tribune (23 January 2004).
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Lai Y., Tsai H. and Yu P. (2011). “Screen-Capturing System with Two-Layer Display
for PowerPoint Presentation to Enhance Classroom Education”. Educational
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Martin F., and Carr M. L. 2015. “An Exploratory Study on K-12 Teachers' Use of
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PowerPoint presentations in the classroom: Re-evaluating the genre
Orlikowski J. W., and Yates J. (Eds.), “Genre Repertoire: Examining the Structuring
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Received: 6 May 2018
Accepted: 23 July 2018
Cite this article as:
D’Angelo, Larissa
2018.
“PowerPoint Presentations in the Classroom: Re-Evaluating the
Genre”. Language Value 10 (1), 29-44. Jaume I University ePress: Castelló, Spain. http://www.e-
revistes.uji.es/languagevalue.
ISSN 1989-7103
Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors
44
Language Value
November 2018, Volume 10, Number 1 pp. 45-66
ISSN 1989-7103
Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art
appreciation in primary school
Ruth Breeze
Instituto Cultura y Sociedad, Universidad de Navarra, Spain
ABSTRACT
Fine arts offer opportunities for multimodal approaches in education. Museums and galleries are now
aware of their social role, and provide outreach activities designed to bring an understanding of art to a
wider public. Their websites offer educational material for school children, showing how artistic
knowledge and sensitivity can be cultivated with young age groups. However, little attention has been
paid to such didactic material by discourse analysts interested in multimodality. This paper builds on
Swales’s (2016) article on the genre of the single image account (SIA), which centres on texts about
famous paintings written by experts for a general readership. Here, I focus on SIAs for didactic purposes,
examining pedagogical resources on the National Gallery’s website. Accessible SIAs are combined with
suggestions to enhance primary school pupils’ learning through creative activities across a variety of
modes. Guidelines are provided for writing SIAs for educational purposes in other contexts.
Keywords: primary education, art education, multimodality, genre analysis, discourse analysis, single
image analysis
I. INTRODUCTION
Over the last thirty years, the role of museums and art galleries in many countries has
been transformed, so that we can now talk of their key role in bringing culture to wider
audiences and promoting lifelong learning. As far as children are concerned, it is clear
that museums and galleries have a special function as educational spaces outside the
classroom that offer a rich learning environment (Arbués and Naval 2014). With this in
mind, leading art galleries around the world have developed an increasingly diverse
range of educational and outreach activities designed to bring the works they house to a
larger public, and to promote a deeper understanding of art among different target
groups (Tishman et al. 2007). As a result, many art galleries have devised educational
programmes of activities for children of different ages, including hands-on workshops
(Brooklyn Museum 2018), special guided tours for different target groups, or invitations
to respond in visual form to the works of art on display (National Gallery 2018).
Outside the English-speaking world such adaptations were generally less common,
Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors
45
Ruth Breeze
possibly for budgetary reasons, but there are signs that this is changing (Fontal Merillas
2009). Most national and regional governments now acknowledge that investment in
national heritage is an important goal, and within this, that it is important to promote an
understanding of this legacy among the younger generation. For this reason, it is useful
to look at the educational strategies adopted in countries like the USA and the UK,
which have a longer tradition of bringing culture to a wider audience. This may help
institutions in other countries to develop resources along similar lines, either by
adapting them for use in local languages, or by devising activities and materials in
English for an international audience, or for local schools involved in Content and
Language Integrated Learning (Breeze and García Laborda 2016). One of the simplest
and least expensive educational strategies to emulate and implement is the preparation
of material based on specific artists or individual works of art, adjusted for different age
groups. Such material can be used by schools to prepare their visits, or as an aid when
studying a particular topic. If it is appropriately adapted to the age groups in question, it
can help children learn to experience and appreciate art (Harris and Zucker 2016), and
might also act as a stimulus for creative responses of different kinds, thus involving the
principle of learning-by-doing (Martikainen 2017).
One such resource is provided in the National Gallery, London, as part of its ongoing
educational outreach programme (National Gallery 2018). It consists of sets of notes for
primary school teachers, each of which has an explanation of one painting, accompanied
by other information (such as background details about the artist’s life, his patrons, or
the subjects of the painting), and in most cases, ideas for educational activities designed
to help children respond to the painting, or encourage them to develop their own
creative skills. These resources are linked to the “Take one picture” project that the
Gallery has carried out for many years in collaboration with primary schools. Each year,
a particular picture from the National Gallery is chosen, and the Gallery provides
educational material and short courses for teachers about it. At the end of each season,
the Gallery hosts an exhibition showing some of the work that schoolchildren have
produced in response to the painting chosen. This programme has several advantages
for our present purposes: the National Gallery provides a considerable volume of
material designed specifically for primary school teachers, this is always focused on a
single work of art, and it is expressly intended to be used by the teachers both to
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Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art appreciation in primary school
develop their pupils’ appreciation of art and to foster their creativity. In this paper, my
aim is to explore how these “Notes for Teachers” materialise these aims discursively,
and to relate this to the bibliography on art education and museum pedagogy, in the
hope that it will be interesting for theorists, but also useful for those involved in art
education elsewhere.
In this paper, my main approach is discourse analytical, informed by genre theory.
Genres serve typical socially recognised communicative purposes, and are in some
sense conventionalised
(Bhatia 2004). Genres provide a window onto professional
practices, and onto the values and epistemology of particular disciplinary communities.
By finding out what is stable, or at least frequent, in particular genres, we can learn
more about the community that produced them, how they think and how they
communicate. Within this, in the concrete case at hand, it is striking that from the
perspective of applied linguistics, relatively little attention has been paid to the area of
educational and popularising discourses about the visual arts. Despite the intense
interest in multimodality and text-image interplay that has developed over the last thirty
years (Bateman 2014), most work in the educational field has centred on how picture
books create meaning through convergent or complementary semiotic modes
(Nicolajeva and Scott 2001, Salisbury and Styles 2012), or how textbooks, infographics
or websites exploit intermodal effects (Unsworth 2006). Little research is available that
explicitly deals with the way the written mode deals with the visual one, or how
language is used to talk about (rather than with or alongside) pictures.
One honourable exception to this is Swales’s ground-breaking paper “Configuring
image and context: writing ‘about’ pictures” (2016), which examines one-page accounts
of single masterpieces intended for educated adult readers. In this paper, I build on
Swales’s analysis in two ways: first, by examining texts about art written for primary
school teachers, in the knowledge that they are likely to incorporate aspects that may
help these readers to arouse children’s interest in art; and second, by looking at the
practical suggestions available alongside most of these texts, which propose classroom
activities and project work to stimulate children’s creativity in a variety of media. I will
then use this analysis to build a heuristic that could be useful for anyone who needs to
write popular educational material to accompany works of art.
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Ruth Breeze
II. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
Works of art in museums and galleries are almost invariably accompanied by written
accounts, whether in the form of labels or brief explanations, or in longer formats such
as press releases, exhibition catalogues, popular art books and critical analyses. To
these, we must add websites and audioguides, which also provide abundant information
in different modes. Within this, the single image analysis (SIA) provides a central focus
for analysis, since this is a genre found across many of these different publications, and
one which in some sense holds the key to art appreciation and education. As Swales
(2016) notes, writing about pictures involves first
“reading” the picture, and then
sequencing the description of the image itself with discussion of any relevant aspects of
the context
(subject, artist, period, movement, etc.). Although the twofold aim of
description and discussion might seem to lend itself to some kind of general-specific
macrostructure (in this case, realised in terms of first context, then description), or
perhaps a specific-general structure
(starting from the image and moving to a
commentary encompassing aspects of its background), this does not seem to be usual
among art writers. As Swales (2016) shows, what seems to be typical is a kind of
“dialectical tacking” (Geertz 1980: 103) between the image, on the one hand, and the
background, on the other. Regarding move structure, Swales’s own analysis of the SIA
identifies this zigzagging between image and background as perhaps the characteristic
hallmark of art writing for a general public. In the alternation between image and
context, most of Swales’s examples seemed to set out from the context, and then to
intersperse description of the image with discussion of different aspects of background,
but the amount of text dedicated to each, and the length of each
“turn”, varied
considerably from one text to another.
Beyond this, Swales also analyses five other features that he found to be typical of the
SIAs in his corpus. These are:
o comparisons (with other works, or with other artists, styles or periods);
o a relative scarcity of intertextual references (i.e. to the writings of other critics or
art historians);
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Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art appreciation in primary school
o complex epistemic patterning, in which speculation is prominent and in which
the writer offers “contested (or at least contestable) interpretations of the art
objects as well as speculations about the artists and the factors that may have led
to the production and construction of their works”;
o frequent use of brackets, to introduce information such as important dates, the
whereabouts of paintings, and explanations of materials or techniques;
o positive evaluative language, used to bring out particular qualities of the painting
or painter.
In this paper, I will use the general principles of genre analysis (Bhatia 2004, Swales
1990), and the previous work by Swales (2016) to build a description of the SIAs
intended for primary school teachers. From the general principles of genre analysis
(Swales 1990, Bhatia 2004), it would be expected that these texts will bear some kind of
family resemblance to the SIAs analysed in Swales (2016), but that their slightly
different communicative purpose will condition their content and structure in different
ways. My analysis is complemented with an overview of the different types of activity
proposed with a view to enhancing children’s experience of art. In the last section, I will
provide a heuristic intended to guide writers who need to produce texts about art for
educational purposes, based on my observations and analysis.
III. TEXTS AND METHOD
My study focuses on 25 sets of “Notes for Primary Teachers”, published in the
“Teachers’ notes” section of the National Gallery website (National Gallery 2018). The
Notes had all been prepared for the “Take one picture” scheme that has been running
annually since 1995. Notes centring on an entire exhibition, rather than a single image,
were excluded from this study. In each case, a single picture from the collection was
selected, Notes were prepared, and schoolchildren from all over the country were invited
to submit examples of how a class or year group used this particular painting to inspire
creative learning. The children’s work was then exhibited by the Gallery in the popular
“Take one picture” exhibition.
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Ruth Breeze
All of the Notes included in the present study focused on a single image, and 17 were
principally pictures of human subjects, while there were five landscapes, two seascapes
and one still life. The Notes were downloaded from the website and read carefully, in
order to note structural organisation and any other features that they had in common.
They were then re-read and coded, and illustrative examples of text selected for each of
the main features identified.
IV. GENRE FEATURES
Each of the Notes consists of a SIA of variable length (generally around 2000 words,
but sometimes much shorter), accompanied by the image of the painting itself,
sometimes with one or two other images, such as close-up shots of details within the
painting, or other paintings using a comparable technique or subject. After the main
text, most of the Notes include a list of activities that could be used with primary school
pupils, sometimes graded according to age or curricular objectives.
The text itself is often subdivided by means of headings such as “About the artist”,
“About the painting”, “About the subject”. However, the Notes vary greatly: in some
cases, the writer has preferred to include a single section with the title “About the
painting”, while in others original headings are inserted, such as “Artistic licence” or
“The end of an era”.
Although some of the aspects identified by Swales (2016) were also found here, certain
features are prominent in the Notes that do not appear in his analysis. We might
speculate that some of these, at least, are related to the fact that these texts are written
for a specific target: primary school teachers who are going to use the picture with their
class.
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Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art appreciation in primary school
Graph 1. Features included in Notes on paintings of human figures (blue) and landscapes/seascapes/still-
lifes (red).
In what follows, I shall discuss some of the more prominent features identified in most
of the Notes.
IV.1. Tacking between image and context
Like the SIAs analysed by Swales, these texts interweave descriptions of the painting
with explanations about the personal, historical and artistic background. The following
example from the notes about “The hay wain” by John Constable serve to illustrate this
back-and-forth movement, which seems to take the reader skilfully in and out of the
painting, emulating the way a guide might point to features of the picture and interlace
these observations with explanations of different kinds. In the example, I have italicised
references to the image:
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(1) Before Constable was born his parents lived in the mill house and afterwards the family
continued to live in the Suffolk countryside - the setting for this painting. Constable drew much
of his initial inspiration for scenes such as this one from memories of the childhood he had spent
in the area. The wisps of smoke curling from the chimney of the house, and the woman beside it,
drawing water from the river, give the scene a harmonious, domesticated atmosphere. In the
background, in the yellow and green fields, dappled with sunlight, we can see (
) The cloudy,
wind-swept sky would seem to indicate the possibility of rain and certainly evokes the English
summertime weather. Constable actually made many of the cloud studies for this painting on
Hampstead Heath in London. (Notes to Constable’s “The hay wain”)
This free-flowing approach to textual organisation is most pronounced in those sets of
Notes which do not have internal subheadings. In others, where the text is subdivided
into sections with titles like
“About the painting”,
“About the subject”, etc., the
organisation is more constrained, but even here the tendency to zigzag is perceptible.
For example, in the notes on Turner’s
“The fighting Temeraire”, a section on
background accomplishes seamless moves from context to image, as in the following
example:
(2) The development of steam power was recognised at the time as enormously important, but as
with any new technology, responses ranged from the wildly enthusiastic to the deeply
pessimistic. These diverse reactions in a time of change are reflected in The Fighting Temeraire,
where Turner exaggerates the stark contrast between the two vessels, which stand for the old
order and the new. As the sun sets on the horizon to the right, the new moon rises in the sky.
(Notes to Turner’s “The fighting Temeraire i”)
As this example illustrates, the descriptions provided in the notes are rarely just
descriptions, in the sense that they have a didactic purpose - to draw our attention to
particular aspects of the painting and bring out their significance. When the writer tells
us that the sun sets on the right as the new moon rises, he/she is not simply providing a
routine description of the painting: he/she is drawing our attention to features that we
might otherwise not have seen, and bringing out the relevance of these in the light of the
background he/she has just explained. The written text largely follows the script of a
guided tour, in which the guide/writer points to aspects of interest within the painting
and relates these to external issues (themes, symbolism, artist, subject).
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Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art appreciation in primary school
Sometimes, the description of the picture has to be more explicit than a guide would be,
in terms of what goes where, as the text has to perform the role of the pointing finger to
show where the points of interest lie, and also has to bring out the importance of visual
aspects (such as colour or line) that might not need to be indicated so explicitly with an
audience standing nearby:
(3) There is story-telling in the picture, but we notice the setting first: the early morning sky, the
sun (…). Next we may take in the bustle of the port (…). We may have to look quite closely to
spot the Queen. Claude helps us to do this through the composition of the picture. He leads our
eyes to the group of people on the steps on the right: they are at an intersection of a line of
perspective (the step) and the strong vertical of the far left column of the palace. The queen is
marked out in the group by the bold colours of her clothes: a pinkish-red tunic, a royal blue cloak
and a golden crown. (Notes to Claude’s “Seaport with the embarkation of the Queen of Shebaii”)
The “tacking” noted by Swales (2016: 25) can thus be related to the didactic function of
teaching people how to look (Tishman et al. 2007: 61-62): as we follow the text, we can
experience the process of slowing down, looking, pausing and looking again that is so
important in the development of our powers of observation. As Fontal Merillas explains
(2009: 84), one of the challenges in art education is to teach strategies to develop
receptivity, to guide people so that they can feel their way into a work of art. The
recursive describing and explaining encapsulated in the Notes is a textual representation
of this expert process of pointing, sharing and bringing out the wealth of meaning
within each picture for the novice observer.
As Graph 1 shows, the Notes also contained some other recurring themes. These are
explained below, with examples where appropriate.
IV.2. Explanation of historical background
One feature which is prominent in the examples that Swales (2016) uses, but which he
does not analyse in any depth, is the presentation of historical background. In the Notes,
historical information is present in most cases, and tends to be pitched at a popular
level, bringing out direct connections with the picture:
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Ruth Breeze
(4) The 1760s saw the beginning of the Industrial Revolution which went on to dramatically
affect the lives of all British people. Wright produced many paintings of industrial environments
with strong contrasts of light and shadow, such as blacksmiths’ forges, glass blowing houses and
blast furnaces. (Notes to Wright’s “An experiment on a bird in the air pump iii”)
Background is also typically provided in the form of explanations of terminology used
in the title or description of the picture:
(5) The parading figures in Rubens’ composition depict a Roman ‘triumph’. A triumphal
procession was the greatest honour that could be given to a Roman general and was usually
awarded to celebrate a great military campaign or victory.
(Notes to Rubens’ “A Roman
triumphiv ”)
In general, we can assume that the person writing the Notes assumes little knowledge on
the part of the reader, or at least, that he/she wishes to make the information as clear,
explicit and straightforward as possible for teachers who are going to use the painting
with primary school children.
IV.3. Appeal to human interest
Perhaps with the primary school target audience in mind, the writers of the Notes often
try to engage human interest in the people represented in the picture. This is represented
in Graph 1 as engagement with characters, but also within the various types of narrative
that appear in the Notes. Intuitively the appeal to human interest would seem to promote
the forging of a personal connection, so that observers learn to relate more deeply to the
image (Tishman et al. 2007: 64-65):
(6) The organ’s sound presumably has inspired the caged bullfinch to sing, which in turn has
provoked the predatory cat to leap hopefully up the back of the boy’s chair. The two girls seem
unaware of this small drama, while baby Thomas, rusk in hand, has eyes only for the cherries
held out by his elder sister.
(Notes to Hogarth's “The Graham childrenv ”)
The Notes also encourage readers to take an interest in the artist and his life:
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Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art appreciation in primary school
(7) In 1630, at the age of 53, Rubens married again. To everyone’s surprise he did not marry into
the nobility, but chose Helene Fourment, the 16-year-old daughter of a respectable merchant
family. Rubens was clearly bowled over by his new wife with whom he has five children, and
she figures in numerous portraits, including a version of ‘The Judgement of Paris’ in which she
appears as Venus. (Notes to Rubens' “An autumn landscape with a view of Het Steenvi ”)
Within the cultivation of human interest, the child perspective has a particular
importance. This perspective appears in various ways, including the explanations of life
in the painter’s time:
(8) Boys would be apprenticed around the age of 14 and would need to train for some years. As
well as learning to draw and paint they needed to master various practical and craft skills. Once
trained, they could join the painters’ guild and set up as independent masters with their own
assistants and apprentices and hope to gain prestigious commissions. (Notes to Pintoricchio's
“Penelope with the suitorsvii ”)
But the account of the people in the painting, if these are children, also tends to be a
special focus of interest:
(9) The young girl on the right of the painting holds a hoop and stick. The hoop for such a toy
might be made of metal or wood, and the object of the game was to keep the hoop upright while
rolling it along the ground with the stick. Skilled players could do this for lengthy amounts of
time and some performed tricks. (Notes to Renoir's “The umbrellasviii ”)
(10) The painting has a jolly atmosphere with the three children making a lot of noise and
enjoying themselves. And it’s painted in a realistic way, so you can imagine being in this room
with them, singing along and hearing their laughter. (Notes to Molenaer's “Two boys and a girl
making music xi ”)
IV.4. Use of embedded narrative
One aspect that is particularly prominent in these SIAs, presumably because of their
didactic purpose and young wider audience, is narrative, which again can involve either
telling the story depicted, or recounting incidents from the life of the painter, the
commissioning of the painting, or its subsequent reception (see Human interest, above,
and Graph 1).
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Ruth Breeze
(11) Odysseus is the figure coming through the door disguised by the Goddess Athena as an old
beggar with his staff. On the wall above Penelope’s head are his bow and quiver of arrows.
Penelope sets up an archery contest saying she will marry the suitor who can string the bow and
win the contest. No one is strong enough to string the bow except Odysseus himself. He reveals
his identity and the couple are reunited. (Notes to Pintoricchio's “Penelope with the suitors”)
This narrativising tendency also extends to the story of objects in the painting:
(12) This drinking-horn, made in 1565, still exists and is on show at the Amsterdam Museum in
Amsterdam. It belonged to the Saint Sebastian Archers who were the likely patrons of the
painting. On special occasions the officers would gather to feast and the horn would be filled
with wine and ceremoniously passed among them. (Notes to Kalf's “Still life with the drinking
horn of the St Sebastian’s archers’ guild, lobster and glassesx ”)
However, it should also be noted that the Notes are intended for people working within
a rather broad age range, which means that the narratives offered are not geared to a
particular age group. It seems that the teachers in each case would be responsible for
adapting the contents and language of the story to their students’ level and interests.
IV. 5. Positive evaluative language
In his analysis, Swales (2016) pointed to evaluative language as one of the features that
seems to be present in essence in SIAs, but which is subject to individual (or possibly
cultural) variation. Here, since the writers are anonymous, it would be difficult to trace
any cultural effects. There is certainly evaluative language in almost all the Notes, but it
is administered very sparsely and soberly. Thus we are told that “The stonemason’s
yard” is “often regarded as Canaletto’s masterpiece”, while Turner is “one of Britain’s
best-known landscape painters”.
A more interesting kind of evaluation tends to be delivered through the wording of the
descriptions themselves: we read that Pintoricchio “cleverly gives us a sense of the
whole narrative” by showing different episodes of Odysseus’ story in the foreground
and background, while Turner’s sailing ship is “painted delicately in light tones” before
a “glorious sunset”. The focus of these SIAs is on observation and response to the
image, but there are none of the “enthused evaluations” reported by Swales (2016: 32),
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Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art appreciation in primary school
and objective observation is generally preferred to emotional evocations of aesthetic
effects.
IV.6. Using the five senses
With the target audience in mind, some of the Notes draw on senses other than sight in
order to suggest ways of presenting the picture. The most usual strategy is through the
evocation of sound, as in example (10) cited above describing Molenaer's picture, or
example (13) below:
(13) The picture is not only full of riotous colour and movement but also full of imaginable
sounds: you can almost hear the growls of the animals; the horns and pipes being blown by
musicians; the pounding of footsteps. (Notes to Rubens’s “A Roman triumph”)
Other senses are occasionally engaged in these SIAs, particularly touch, in the context
of temperature:
(14) How cold is it? Cold enough for ice that is safe for skating - and for a large horse to walk
on it! (Notes to Beerstraaten's “The castle of Muiden in winter xiii ”)
But interestingly, multisensory response is encouraged in the activities listed at the end
of the Notes much more frequently than it is used in the actual SIA (see Graph 1).
IV.7. Explanation of symbolism
A further didactic strategy that is prominent in these Notes is the special emphasis on
explaining the symbolic aspects of many of the paintings. Some of these glosses are
rather straightforward, like the following one, which boils down to “dogs can symbolise
faithfulness”:
(15) In art, dogs are often used to symbolise marital fidelity, so perhaps Veronese was making a
comment by including them in his painting. (Notes to Veronese, “The family of Darius before
Alexander xii ”)
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Ruth Breeze
However, in other cases the writer attempts a more elaborate explanation involving
several layers of meaning, including aspects of technological, social and cultural history
that shed light on specific aspects of the painting:
(16) Black was an expensive dye at this time and was only worn by wealthy people: it also
signified Melancholy and indicated that the wearer had introspective intellectual qualities, which
were much admired at the time. (Notes to Holbein's “The ambassadors”)
IV.8. Asking questions and speculating
As Graph 1 shows, one feature that many of the Notes have in common is their use of
questions or speculative suggestions, which overlaps with what Swales (2016: 28-29)
calls
“contested interpretations”. Although in his texts this function was frequently
associated with epistemic elements, most particularly hedging and various
hearsay/mindsay evidentials, in the Notes it is mainly represented by direct questions:
(17) Next to this jar stands an imposing figure robed in red, quite different to all the others
present. With his hand outstretched towards us he is the only person to look out of the painting
and make eye-contact with us. Is he asking us a question or perhaps inviting us to take a closer
look? (Notes on Wright’s “An experiment on a bird in the air pump”)
In most cases, these questions have no answer, but sometimes an answer is proposed,
usually an answer in line with the age of the prospective audience and their presumed
response to the picture:
(18) Something, or somebody, has caught the attention of the little girl on the right, and the
woman on the left. What, or whom, are they looking at? Perhaps they are looking at us? It is
almost as if we are standing in the picture with them. (Notes on Renoir's “The umbrellas”)
In a few cases, a more sophisticated analysis is presented, which seems to address the
teachers rather than their (primary age) students. In this case, more complex hedging
devices (“tend to believe”) and uncertainty is stressed (“we cannot be sure”) in order to
spark curiosity:
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Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art appreciation in primary school
(19) But which man in the painting is Alexander? (…) Art historians tend to believe that the man
in crimson is Alexander, because he is more central to the composition, and is the more
conspicuously dressed of the two, but we cannot be sure. The possibility of confusion is
necessary if we are to understand the queen mother’s mistake. Veronese has left us with a
mystery, and after nearly 500 years, we are still not sure of the answer. (Notes to Veronese, “The
family of Darius before Alexander”)
IV.9. Explanation of symbolism
A further aspect that may be particularly prominent because of the educational function
of these texts is their insistence on aspects of technique and material.
(20) Seurat had a special interest in optics and the science of colour, particularly the writings of
the chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul.
(...) Chevreul stated that complementary colours,
opposites on the colour wheel, enhanced each other when placed side-by-side. The use of
complementary contrasts can be seen everywhere in the picture, from small brushstrokes to
larger areas of colour. For example, in the predominantly green riverbank, there are strokes of
the complementary colours pink and green, and also some bright yellow and violet, and orange
and blue. (Notes to Seurat, “Bathers at Asniqresxiv ”)
This emphasis on topics such as primary colours here certainly reflects the primary
school curriculum. However, other explanations of material and technique are more
sophisticated. In the Notes on Wright’s painting “An experiment on a bird in the air
pump”, the question of dark and light is emphasised, and brought into a wider art
historical context:
(21) Wright used screens in his studio to control the light and here he has displayed a dazzling
arrangement of light and deep shadow. The thin layers of dark glaze (paint mixed with varnish to
give a translucent glow) are placed next to more thickly opaque highlights. Using extremes of
light and shade in a painting to create a sense of drama is called chiaroscuro and is most usually
associated with Caravaggio and his followers. (Notes to Wright’s “An experiment on a bird in
the air pump”)
Moreover, the text goes on to explain that this is more frequently found in religious
paintings of the era, and provides two images illustrating uses of chiaroscuro in other
paintings to complement the reader’s understanding of its function.
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Ruth Breeze
In other cases, the explanation deals with the concrete material basis of paint and
canvas. Again, description is complemented by interpretation, in which the work of art
in question is compared with other works or styles.
(22) The painting uses oil paint applied to paper. This gives it a smooth finish, with no surface
texture. The three pieces of paper were stuck together, and the joins are quite visible, especially
at the left. They were then mounted on canvas. This is an unconventional approach, but one
which is typical of Degas. The three sections make it resemble both a triptych, a three-panel
Christian altarpiece, and three-part Japanese woodblock prints.
(Notes to Dégas's
“Beach
sceneix”)
Other Notes concerning technique bring out idiosyncratic aspects of the painting in
question which might be interesting to a young audience, or which illustrate something
significant about the material, technique or style of the picture:
(23) Also visible are lots of pentimenti. Literally meaning ‘changes of minds’, these alterations
or corrections have become increasingly visible as the oil paints have become translucent with
the passage of time. For example the lynx in the bottom right hand corner appears to have an
extra leg and initially the young man in white had a larger head of hair. (Notes to Rubens’s “A
Roman triumph”)
V. HEURISTIC FOR WRITING EDUCATIONAL SINGLE IMAGE
ACCOUNTS
This section is intended as a guide for teachers or museum staff who need to create
educational material for use with young children. In the following section (VI), there is
a compilation of activity types that could be used to accompany the explanation of the
work of art.
Imagine yourself standing in front of the picture, explaining it to a group of children:
What overall impression does this picture make?
How might children use the five senses to respond to this picture?
What themes or aspects do you want to talk about in more detail?
How are these themes or details associated with?:
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Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art appreciation in primary school
o shared human feelings (particularly those accessible to children)
o narratives (myths, legends, historical events)
o symbols (conventional or original)
Are the composition, techniques or materials used interesting?
Do you want to talk about any relevant aspects of the painter’s life?
Are there any mysteries or unanswered questions associated with the painting,
its subject or its artist?
When you are writing your SIA, remember that you need to use words to “point” to
particular aspects of the painting that you want to discuss. You can use expressions like
these to begin your description:
As we can see in the image...
As the picture shows...
Scenes/figures/landscapes like this...
You can then relate these descriptions to background and context by using phrases like:
These colours are associated with...
This image evokes...
The objects here symbolise...
This type of figure is typical of the...
You can go back from discussing context to pointing out instantiations in the painting
by using phrases like:
... is reflected/represented/echoed in the painting, where...
... can be seen in the composition of the picture, which...
Remember, you don’t need to give definitive explanations about everything. It might be
more interesting to open up discussion so that children can try to think of answers:
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What do you think this person is thinking?
Why do you think the artist chose this colour/animal/background?
VI. SAMPLE ACTIVITIES
In this section, I provide an overview of different types of activities found in the Notes,
without reference to specific paintings, age groups or curricular goals, and going from
the more general response activities to the more complex or specific ones.
o
Learning to look at the picture more carefully: working together in pairs, one
pupil describes the picture and another draws, then they swap roles; using the
website to create crops of the picture and then working together in groups to
piece together the whole picture.
o
Responding to the people in the painting on a personal level: what do you think
the people are saying/thinking/feeling? If you could ask one of the people one
question, what would it be?
o
Multimodal response to the painting: ‘listen’ with your eyes, what can you hear?
What is the noisiest thing in the painting? If you could jump into the painting,
what would you see, hear, smell, touch? Who or what might live in there? What
music would go with this painting? If the picture were an advertisement, what
could you use it to advertise?
o
Responding to the subject of the painting by reproducing one part of it, or
drawing/painting something along similar lines, i.e. a full length painting of
oneself with a classmate, a tableau of a scene from mythology, a group portrait,
a skyscape, a “modern” still life, a representation of the same scene in a different
season.
o
Response to the subject, theme or mood of the painting by creating works in
different media, including visual arts, i.e. sculpture and film, but also music or
imaginative writing (stories, poems, descriptions).
o
Using part of the picture as a basis for a design: i.e. the floor in the painting is
made of patterned tiles, so design your own patterned tiles.
62
Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art appreciation in primary school
o Experimenting with materials used by artists in the past, e.g. egg tempera.
o Researching and responding to artistic styles: research the elements of Rococo
style and design something inspired by it.
o Exploring connections with other curricular areas: find out the French words for
the objects in the painting. Make a geographical enquiry into volcanoes. On a
modern map, trace Odysseus’s journey from Troy to the island of Ithaca.
Investigate how other religions and culture participate in similar parades and
celebrations today. Investigate dragon symbolism in other cultures.
VII. CONCLUSIONS
We have seen that these Notes share some of the basic features identified by Swales
(2016), most particularly the characteristic zigzagging between image descriptions and
context explanations. In this, it is interesting to think of the role of the writer as
emulating that of the museum guide, but also as reflecting a stable tendency among art
writers to oscillate between the visual and the verbal, or between showing and telling. In
Baxendall’s classic words (1979: 455), “one of the art historian’s specific faculties is to
find words to indicate the character of shapes, colours and organizations of them. But
these words are not so much descriptive as demonstrative”. Unlike other multimodal
genres, where the different semiotic modes may generate convergent, complementary or
divergent messages
(Bateman
2014) and language-image interactions have to be
decoded by users (Unsworth 2006), in this genre the written text is expressly dedicated
to revealing and explicating the image. Here, the writer uses words explicitly to create a
shared vision of the picture, and to guide the reader’s eyes into and around the world
within the frame.
Despite the underlying commonality that these Notes share with Swales’s SIAs, certain
new features are prominent here. We might speculate that some of these, at least, are
related to the fact that these texts are written for a specific double target: primary school
teachers (immediate readers) who are going to use the picture with their class (target
audience). As Fontal Merillas explains (2009: 84), one of the challenges in art education
is to facilitate the development of receptivity and artistic sensibility. Teachers therefore
63
Ruth Breeze
need to deploy a range of strategies to encourage their pupils to share a sensation,
feeling or idea, and thus to help them feel their way into a work of art (Harris and
Zucker 2016). For this reason, aspects such as human interest (in the people represented
in the picture, or in the artist and his life) are often highlighted in these SIAs, and
narrative (again, telling the story depicted or incidents from the life of the painter) has
an important role in many of the texts. In some of the Notes, multimodal responses
based on hearing/smelling/feeling propose additional points of access to the painting,
stimulating the imagination and encouraging children to experience the picture more
fully (Harris and Zucker 2016). The Notes thus gently propose a series of pedagogical
strategies for the teachers to use with their pupils. The activities suggested at the end of
the Notes build on this by prompting multimodal responses of the kind recommended in
recent art pedagogy (Martikainen 2017). Finally, one discursive feature that many of the
notes have in common is their use of questions or speculative suggestions, which
overlaps with what Swales calls “contested interpretations”, but which is generally
expressed here through direct questions. Unlike the hedged speculations reported by
Swales, these do not provide a glimpse of academic controversy, but rather convey a
certain cognitive challenge which children may find stimulating.
Notes
i
“The fighting Temeraire”, by Joseph Turner.
ii
“Seaport with the embarkation of the Queen of Sheba”, by Claude Lorrain.
iii “An experiment on a bird in the air pump”, by Joseph Wright.
iv “A Roman triumph”, by Peter Paul Rubens.
v “The Graham children”, by William Hogarth.
vi “An autumn landscape with a view of Het Steen”, by Peter Paul Rubens.
vii “Penelope with the suitors”, by Pintoricchio (Bernardino di Betto).
viii “The umbrellas”, by Pierre-August Renoir.
ix “Beach scene”, by Edgar Dégas.
x “Still life with the drinking horn of the St Sebastian’s archers’ guild, lobster and glasses”, by Willem
Kalf.
xi “Two boys and a girl making music”, by Jan Miense Molenaer.
xii “The family of Darius before Alexander”, by Paolo Veronese.
xiii “The castle of Muiden in winter”, by Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraaten.
xiv “Bathers at Asniqres”, by Georges-Pierre Seurat,
All Notes are available on the webpage:
64
Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art appreciation in primary school
REFERENCES
Arbués, E. and Naval, C. 2014. “Museums as educational social spaces”. Estudios
sobre Educación, 27, 133-151.
Bateman, J. 2014. Text and image. A critical introduction to the visual/verbal divide.
London: Routledge.
Baxendall, M. 1979. “The language of art history”. New Literary History, 10, 453-465.
Bhatia, V. K. 2004. Worlds of written discourse. London: Continuum.
Breeze, R. and García Laborda, J. 2016. “Issues in teacher education for bilingual
schools”. Estudios sobre Educación, 31, 9-12.
Brooklyn
Museum.
2018.
Hands on art.
19
March
2018.
Fontal Merillas, O. 2009. “Los museos de arte: un campo emergente de investigaciyn e
innovaciyn para la enseñanza del arte”. Revista Electrónica Interuniversitaria
para la Formación del Profesorado, 12 (4), 75-88.
Geertz, C. 1980. Negara. The theater state in nineteenth-century Bali. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Harris, B. and Zucker, S. 2016. “Making the absent present: the imperative of
teaching art history”. Art History Pedagogy and Practice, 1 (1). 19 March 2018.
Martikainen, J.
2017.
“Making pictures as a method of teaching art history”.
International Journal of Education and the Arts, 18 (19). 19 March 2018.
National
Gallery.
2018.
Take
one
picture.
19
March
2018.
picture
Nicolajeva, M. and Scott, C. 2001. How picturebooks work. London: Routledge.
Salisbury, M. and Styles, M.
2012. Children’s picturebooks: the art of visual
storytelling. London: Lawrence King.
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Ruth Breeze
Sears, E. 2002. “‘Reading’ images”. In Sears, E. and T. K. Thomas (Eds.) Reading
medieval images. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1-17.
Swales, J.
1990. Genre analysis. English in academic and research settings.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Swales, J. 2016. “Configuring image and context: writing ‘about’ pictures”. English for
Specific Purposes, 41, 22-35.
Swales, J. and Feak, C. 2013. Academic writing for graduate students. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Tishman, S., McKinney, A. and Straughn, C. 2007. Study center learning: An
investigation of the educational power and potential of the Harvard University
Art Museums Study Center. Boston MA: Harvard Project Zero.
Unsworth, L. 2006. “Towards a metalanguage for multiliteracies education: describing
the meaning-making resources of language-image interaction”. English
Teaching Practice and Critique, 5 (1), 55-76.
Received: 10 April 2018
Accepted: 23 July 2018
Cite this article as:
Breeze, Ruth 2018. “Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art appreciation in
primary school”. Language Value 10 (1), 45-66 Jaume I University ePress: Castelló, Spain.
http://www.e-revistes.uji.es/languagevalue.
ISSN 1989-7103
Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors
66
Language Value
November 2018, Volume 10, Number 1 pp. 67-88
ISSN 1989-7103
Teacher’s feedback vs. computer-generated feedback: A focus
on articles
Tamara Hernández Puertas
Escuela Oficial de Idiomas (Castellón), Spain
ABSTRACT
As attested by a vast number of studies, in the process of second/foreign language acquisition feedback
plays an important role as it may trigger learners’ noticing of the mismatch between their interlanguage
and the target language (Schmidt 1990). In foreign language classrooms, feedback on written production
may not be properly provided due to a large number of students or time constraints (Chacón-Beltrán
2017). In this sense, the use of new technologies in the classroom may help both the teacher in the
correction process and the student in his/her language development. In the present study we aim to
compare feedback provided by the teacher and feedback provided by the software Grammar Checker
(Lawley 2015). One group of English-as-a-foreign language (EFL) students received teacher’s feedback
on their mistakes on articles in their written production whereas a second group obtained feedback on the
same grammar aspect by means of the above-mentioned software. The control group did not obtain
feedback on their errors. Results show statistically significant differences in the last composition for the
group who received teacher’s feedback, although this feedback did not have a lasting effect in the tailor-
made delayed test. In light of these findings, we may claim that the use of Grammar Checker as a
potential tool for self-correction and feedback may facilitate students’ language development, at least on
the grammar aspect under analysis.
Keywords: corrective feedback, teacher’s feedback, computer-generated feedback, writing, articles,
errors
I. INTRODUCTION
Second language acquisition (SLA) is a complex process involving multiple variables
along with natural elements such as errors, which should be regarded as part of the
language learning process and not as something negative that has to be avoided. By
means of errors, learners may test their hypotheses about how the target language works
and teachers obtain information about learners’ progress and difficulties in their
development. Traditionally, teachers (and sometimes, peers) have provided correction in
the formal context in various ways to help learners overcome their errors (both oral and
written) and further their learning. The issue of whether mistakes should be corrected,
when and how, among other questions, has fuelled much research, together with the
elaboration of different typologies accounting for corrective feedback
(CF) types,
Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors
67
Tamara Hernández Puertas
ranging from most indirect to most direct. However, there seems to be some agreement
on the fact that, although demanded by the learners, providing CF is a complex task to
do. Corrective feedback for oral mistakes may be obtrusive and thus interrupt the flow
of conversation. In turn, CF for written errors may take much of the teacher’s time and
sometimes it is only provided superficially.
Over the past two decades, there have been efforts to develop software which aids in the
process of student writing along with some other software which provides a score on
students’ written production. The focus of this study is on the former, that is, we aim at
contributing to the expanding body of research on computer-generated feedback in an
attempt to examine whether this type of feedback has an impact on students’ linguistic
accuracy when compared to teacher’s feedback. With this aim in mind, the software
Grammar Checker was employed by one group of students as source of feedback on
errors, whereas another group obtained teacher’s feedback.
II. CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK AND SLA
Making mistakes is part of the natural process of learning a language. However, when
producing output, students may not be aware of how successful they have been at
conveying their messages if some kind of feedback is not offered. Corrective feedback
becomes, then, a key factor in the SLA process since mere language exposure does not
seem to be enough and second language (L2) speakers need some kind of corrective
feedback to notice the discrepancies between their output and the L2.
The term corrective feedback
(Lyster
1998) has adopted different terminology
depending on the author: for example, ‘negative evidence’ (Long 1991), ‘interactional
feedback’
(Lyster and Mori 2006) or ‘negative feedback’
(Ortega 2009). For the
purposes of the present study, we will adhere to the definition provided by Russell and
Spada (2006: 134): ‘Corrective feedback will refer to any feedback, provided to a
learner, from any source, that contains evidence of learner error of language form’. In
this sense, corrective feedback refers to the teacher’s reaction to a mistake, when this
reaction causes attention to language forms and has a corrective aim. Much research has
been carried out on CF, and most has employed different types of CF based on the
learner’s reaction (i.e., uptake). For instance, Ellis (2009) classified CF types along the
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Teacher’s feedback vs. computer-generated feedback: A focus on articles
implicit-explicit dichotomy. Implicit feedback referred to recasts (i.e., reformulation of
the learner’s incorrect utterance minus the error), repetition and clarification requests, in
which the learner has to work harder in order to spot the mistake and self-repair. In turn,
explicit feedback included explicit corrections, metalinguistic explanations, elicitations
and paralinguistic signals which showed in a more direct way that the learner’s
production was wrong.
Although the effectiveness of CF on acquisition is a debatable issue, it is regarded as an
intervening element in the process of SLA. In fact, since the early 90s, a vast number of
studies have demonstrated the beneficial role of CF on acquisition. Moreover, some
meta-analyses and reviews of the literature (for example, Russell and Spada 2006,
Spada 2011), point to the positive effects of CF for L2 grammar learning and its
durability over time as long as it is noticeable, comprehensible and as individualized as
possible.
II.1. The effect of corrective feedback on written production
In the current multimedia age, different modes of writing and image combine to make
multimodal texts which communicate meanings and may be used for language learning.
Images
(including the use of colors) play an essential role in multimodal
communication as attention-getters (Kress 2010), therefore maximizing the potential for
learning. In this sense, a crucial condition for the effectiveness of CF is that the student
notices the input features and the differences between his/her interlanguage and the
target language forms. The notion of noticing was coined by Schmidt (1990) and
supported by other researchers (e.g., Mackey et al. 2000, Philp 2003) as one of the
crucial elements necessary for acquisition to take place, in the sense that noticing is
essential for input to become intake. Intake has been defined by Ellis (1994: 708) as
‘that portion of input that learners notice and therefore take into temporary memory’.
Learners may notice input thanks to the CF provided to them in the language classroom.
Indeed, research has shown that CF does occur in the classroom in a high proportion
(e.g., Panova and Lyster 2002) as an intervening variable in the process of language
learning. The benefits of CF in oral interaction point to learners’ noticing of problematic
forms, opportunities to modify output and test hypotheses, and an increase in linguistic
69
Tamara Hernández Puertas
accuracy. Yet, the debate about the value of written corrective feedback
(WCF,
henceforth) has yielded conflicting results (Evans et al. 2010). For instance, in a much-
cited study by Truscott (1996), he argued that ‘correction is not only unhelpful but even
counterproductive’ (1996: 354). In the same vein, Polio et al. (1998) and Fazio (2001)
stated that CF can be discouraging and ineffective to improve subsequent writings due
to the pressure it may create on learners. However, broadly speaking, research has found
a beneficial effect of CF on writing accuracy (e.g., Bitchener 2008, Lee 2013). More
specifically, Bitchener and Ferris (2012) claim that students' accuracy improves when
they attend to feedback as they draw their attention to linguistic inconsistencies or
mistakes. Moreover, for ethical reasons, learners need to be provided with CF in their
written production, even more when it has been shown that students want to improve
their linguistic accuracy (Ferris and Hedgcock 2005) and that they expect to have their
writing mistakes marked (Guénette 2007).
Feedback may be delivered in a more direct (explicit) or indirect (implicit) way. Direct
feedback is offered when the teacher provides the correct form straight away and the
student is supposed to incorporate that correction in the final version. Contrarily, in
indirect feedback the teacher merely indicates in some way (underlining or highlighting
the error, or marking in the margin of the text) that there is an error, without providing
the correction. Thus, the student knows there is a mistake and he/she has to solve it. In
this sense, some voices have claimed that indirect feedback is more desirable because it
may engage students in problem solving and, eventually, in more progress in accuracy
over time than direct feedback (Ferris et al. 2000). Different degrees of explicitness in
feedback provision were examined in Ferris and Roberts’ (2001) study: Group A had
their errors underlined and coded, Group B had their errors underlined but not coded
and Group C (control group) had no error markings. No statistically significant
differences were reported between Group A and B, suggesting that more explicit
feedback (underlining and coding of errors) was not more advantageous than simple
underlining.
Some research has addressed the impact of different types of feedback on accuracy in
student writing. Chandler (2003) had four treatments including (i) Correction, (ii)
Underlining with Description,
(iii) Description of error only, and
(iv) Underline.
Findings show that conditions (i) and (iv) resulted in more accurate pieces of writing in
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Teacher’s feedback vs. computer-generated feedback: A focus on articles
the next assignment, whereas treatments (ii) and (iii), which involved a description of
the error type, had the opposite effect. Overall, the number of studies which have
addressed the effectiveness of direct and indirect WCF show inconclusive findings.
However, there seems to be a wider consensus on the fact that if feedback is provided,
learners’ accuracy tends to improve when compared to control groups receiving no
feedback, as reported by Ene and Upton’s (2014) study.
II.2. Computer-generated feedback in writing
When to provide feedback has been one of the main concerns in the field of language
correction and feedback. Warschauer (2010) claimed that autonomous learning and
revision could be enhanced by promptly delivered feedback. Indeed, when little time
lapses between the student’s writing and the teacher’s CF, learning opportunities may
be maximized. In the same line, Guichon et al. (2012) argued that if learners can get
‘just in time’ feedback, they may self-correct almost immediately after their mistakes
and possibly incorporate this feedback in subsequent writings. In this way, written CF
may be more effective as in traditional classrooms feedback is only provided by the
teacher several days after the written production.
As stated by Spada (2011), corrective feedback occurs both in natural learning contexts
as well as in formal environments, although it is more frequent and presumably more
beneficial and necessary in the latter. Yet, in large classes in which the students are
required to perform written tasks, teachers need to lessen their workload by delegating
work to their students, who may use electronic feedback to self-correct their written
productions (Lee 2013). Therefore, more time could be devoted to other areas which
need more attention in writing, such as content and organization (Chen and Cheng
2008). In this sense, and especially in the education domain, the importance of
technology and the benefits it may provide to the learning process shows how it is
taking over classrooms at all levels. The use of computer tools, what is called
‘computer-assisted language learning’
(CALL), applied to the classroom and the
students' way of working represents an extra value and motivation. In fact, as Becker
stated
(1991:
385),
‘in the
1980s, no single medium of instruction or object of
instructional attention produced as much excitement in the conduct of elementary and
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Tamara Hernández Puertas
secondary education as did the computer.’ CALL is an approach that has many
advantages: first, it adapts to the learning of the students letting them control their own
pace, second, it allows them to be more autonomous since they are the ones who make
their own choices, third, it offers them freedom and authenticity and finally, it develops
their critical thinking. In this vein, computer-mediated feedback may contribute to help
students write more independently both inside and outside the classroom. Moreover,
research from Tiene and Luft
(2001) suggests that the use of technology fosters
individualized communication between teacher and students more often and allows
teachers to focus on higher-order aspects of writing, leaving common grammar or
spelling mistakes to the program.
As just stated, new technological implementations in the language classroom have
influenced the skill of writing, especially the revision and editing processes by means of
online tools. The interplay of range of modes on screen (for example, image and
writing) has resulted in a redesign of how students can receive feedback. As Jewitt put it
(2002: 172), ‘communication and learning are multimodal’. This multimodality may be
significant for writing improvement. In this sense, in the past twenty years, software
aiming at scoring and/or providing feedback on students’ writings has been devised
(e.g., Criterion, MyAccess, Grammarly, Summary Street, to mention but a few), with
diverse degree of effectiveness on students’ satisfaction (Chen and Cheng 2006). Still,
some voices (e.g., Ware and Warschauer 2005) claim that the amount of time a teacher
may spend correcting students’ compositions may be dramatically reduced if teachers
can rely on computer-generated feedback. Moreover, software which generates
feedback on writing has been created providing either reports on grammatical errors or
more holistic assessment on aspects such as content or organization of the piece of
writing. In the case of grammar checkers, Potter and Fuller (2008) reported an increase
in students’ motivation, proficiency and confidence in grammar rules in the use of
English grammar checkers. In turn, Nadasdi and Sinclair (2007) argued that the French
online grammar checking program BonPatron was as effective as teacher correction.
Also, Burston (2008) investigated the accuracy of this grammar checker showing that
88% of errors were spotted by the software. Mistakes were highlighted by means of
color-coding: red indicated those grammatical aspects the student had to modify and
orange was used to signal segments or words which needed to be verified.
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Teacher’s feedback vs. computer-generated feedback: A focus on articles
Despite the a priori benefits of grammar checkers, they are not without limitations. As
argued by Davis (1989), any user of grammar checkers has to set their perceived
usefulness and ease of use, two key factors in Davis’ Technology Acceptance Model
(TAM) determining the likelihood of acceptance of new technology. A second
drawback refers to the fact that sometimes computer-generated feedback may not be
specific or informative enough to guide learners in their revision process, eventually
causing frustration or dissatisfaction (Chen and Cheng 2006).
III. GRAMMAR CHECKER
In 2001 the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) in Madrid started
to work on the software Grammar Checker (GC, henceforth) in an attempt to detect
errors made by English-as-a-foreign-language students. It provides written feedback on
grammar, spelling, and words used incorrectly based on a corpus of eighty million
words ‘taken from the written component of the British National Corpus’ (Lawley
2015: 26). As explained by this author, the program divides the text into segments that
are compared to that corpus and highlighted in red if they do not appear in it or have a
threshold number lower than 0 and 0.1, in orange if they occur in the corpus fewer than
500 times and their threshold numbers range between 0.1 and 0.5, or yellow if they
occur fewer than 75 times and their threshold numbers lie between 0.5 and 0.9.
Therefore, this program requires cognitive process from students as it only uses certain
colors to show frequency but does not offer the possibility to receive corrections at the
click of a mouse. Students are responsible for changing the segment or not upon
reflection. In this way, it offers the opportunity to learn from mistake. GC does not
provide a score for the text, it merely alerts users to those combinations that are rare or
do not occur.
GC works as follows: after creating an account, the student has to write the text and
press “Enter your text” and then “Start” to check if there are any mistakes. First, spelling
mistakes are highlighted in yellow
(also purple if it is a very rare word but not
necessarily a mistake, e.g., proper names) and by clicking on the words highlighted
useful feedback is provided. By clicking on “Modify”, the previous spelling mistakes
can be corrected and checked again by pressing
“Check again”. Then the same
73
Tamara Hernández Puertas
procedure is followed for the
“Incorrect sequences filter” that highlights grammar
mistakes such as ‘These table’, and for the “Problem words filter” which refers to
correct English and does not highlight any word but suggests words that are usually
misused by students, e.g.,
‘insano’
(unhealthy). Therefore, if after reading the
suggestions the student thinks he/she has made a mistake, he/she can modify it.
The most important step for the aims of the present study is the button “Pairs filters”
which highlights phrases that do not usually occur, e.g., ‘had do’. In order to know the
frequency with which those phrases occur and decide whether it is a mistake or not, the
student can use the search engine at the top of the screen. Figure 1 below illustrates a
screenshot of GC:
Figure 1. Screenshot of Grammar Checker.
GC was selected for the purposes of the present study for several reasons: firstly, it
offers a cue (highlighting in colors) so that students can locate, reflect and self-correct,
which, according to the literature, may be conducive to learning. Secondly, GC does not
overwhelm language learners with metalinguistic terminology which may be at odds
with some learners’ literacy (Dikli 2006). Thirdly, this software does not score learner’s
written production, but provides them with feedback and possible suggestions for
improvement. Finally, it is an affordable program for only €14 a year for students
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Teacher’s feedback vs. computer-generated feedback: A focus on articles
aiming, in the present study, for level B2 of the Common European Framework of
Reference of Languages (CEFR).
IV. THE STUDY
Prior to this research, a pilot study to test the use of GC was conducted with a group of
students with a similar level of proficiency as the participants in the present study and
also enrolled in an Official School of Languages. The purpose of that pilot study was,
on the one hand, to test the computer program, and on the other hand, to decide
important aspects such as the level and the number of students participating and the
targeted grammatical aspects (articles, verb tenses and prepositions in this case). One
group of students received teacher’s feedback and another obtained feedback by means
of GC. Analysis of the data collected in the pilot study revealed a higher number of
corrections after computer feedback. Therefore, this program proved helpful in
highlighting and correcting students’ mistakes.
Taking into account previous research pointing at overall benefits of WCF in the
development of students’ writing accuracy on the one hand (Bitchener 2008, Russell
and Spada 2006), and the rapid growth of computerized feedback in educational
contexts on the other (Ene and Upton 2014), in this study we entertain two research
questions. The first research question aims at revealing what type of feedback (teacher
vs. computer) will have a better effect on accuracy in the targeted grammar aspect
(articles). On the other hand, the second research question aims at showing what type of
feedback (teacher vs. computer) will have a lasting effect in the delayed tailor-made
test.
IV.1. Participants
Three groups of Spanish students (n=27) participated in the present study. They were
divided into two treatment groups and the control group. All participants were studying
at an Official School of Languages in order to pass the B2 level for professional reasons
and reported having studied English for over 6 years. Their mother tongue was Spanish
and/or Catalan and their ages ranged from 20 to 50 years old (mean=39.3).
75
Tamara Hernández Puertas
The study was carried out as part of their formal EFL instruction and the compositions
were regular assignments the students had to elaborate as part of their written
homework.
IV.2. Targeted grammar aspect: articles
Errors on rule-governed forms allow for more focused correction than errors which are
not rule-based (Lee 2013). Ferris (1999) termed the first type of errors ‘treatable errors’,
as some grammar errors may be treatable through feedback. In this vein, articles fall
under this ‘treatable’ category and for Spanish EFL students they may be a recurrent
source of errors, especially the zero article. In fact, the English article system has been
shown to be used inaccurately by foreign language learners, even with high proficiency.
Despite the fact that article errors seldom cause misunderstanding, since they possess
low communicative value, it is still necessary for learners to overcome their problems
with this specific grammar form. On this account, Master (1995) pointed out that
attention to the article system was important because this type of errors may leave the
impression that the learners have incomplete control of the target language. Some years
later, Bitchener
(2008) also argued that EFL learners across different language
proficiency levels experience difficulties in their mastery of the English article system.
These perceived difficulties, along with the fact that articles are potentially ‘treatable’,
were the reasons to have articles as targeted grammatical forms for examination.
IV.3. Types of feedback
Group 1 (n=11) received teacher’s feedback, Group 2 (n=8) computer feedback and the
Control Group (n= 8) obtained no feedback on the targeted grammatical aspect.
Computer feedback was provided by Grammar Checker by means of a color code (red,
orange and yellow) as explained in Section III. It was an indirect type of feedback
which only signaled potentially problematic bits in the compositions. For comparability
issues, teacher’s feedback had to be indirect as well, so she also used colors similar to
the ones in the computer software to highlight the mistakes on articles.
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Teacher’s feedback vs. computer-generated feedback: A focus on articles
IV.4. Data collection procedure
In a session prior to the data collection, participants belonging to Group 2 were trained
in the use of Grammar Checker and they were explained what the color code meant and
how they had to correct their mistakes. Afterwards, all participants were asked to write a
180/200-word composition based on a comic strip (Abbey Time 1). In strip 1 someone is
writing a letter to an old woman, in strip 2 Abbey appears next to an Elvis-looking man,
in strip 3 the man is holding some flowers and a teddy bear, in strip 4 a woman different
from the old woman and physically similar to Abbey is looking at the man with a
menacing gaze, in strip 5 Abbey looks sad and in strip 6 someone who seems to be
Abbey is writing a letter. As mentioned above, Group 1 received teacher’s feedback and
Group 2 obtained computer feedback. The control group did not get any feedback on
articles but on other non-targeted grammatical aspects. After this feedback, they rewrote
a second version of the same comic strip (Abbey Time 2) to check whether correction
had been effective. The time elapsed between Abbey 1 and teacher’s feedback was one
week, and between teacher’s feedback and Abbey 2 also one week.
Two weeks after Abbey 2, participants composed a second text based again on a similar
graphic prompt but with different strips (Pam Time 1). In strip 1 someone is writing a
letter while the image of Pam appears in the background. In strip 2 an old woman is
holding a sheet of paper, and in strip 3 the woman who looks like Pam is looking at the
Elvis-looking man with a menacing gaze. In strip 4 the man is showing the woman a
cake he has just made, in strip 5 the old woman looks happy and in strip 6 the old
woman is writing a letter.
The same process as the one depicted above applied: after the first composition (Pam
Time 1), feedback (either by the computer software or the teacher) was provided and
students wrote a second version (Pam Time 2) after 2 weeks from the first version.
Therefore, 4 compositions (Abbey Time 1 and 2 and Pam Time 1 and 2) are the data for
analysis.
Six weeks after having written the last of the four compositions, the participants were
asked to complete an individual tailor-made test (see a sample in Appendix 1) to check
any long-term impact of the two types of feedback. The tailor-made tests included all
the errors each student had made in Abbey Time 2 and Pam Time 2, that is, after having
77
Tamara Hernández Puertas
obtained feedback three times (either from the teacher or the computer). Table 1
illustrates the timeline for data collection.
Table 1. Timeline for the data collection procedure.
Week 1
Abbey T1
Week 2
Teacher's or computer feedback
Week 3
Abbey T2
Week 4
Teacher's or computer feedback
Week 5
Pam T1
Week 6
Teacher's or computer feedback
Week 7
Pam T2
Week 8
Teacher's or computer feedback
Week 14
Tailor-made test
All four compositions belonged to the same genre, that of narrative story, in which a
short story is described. The learners had to describe what was happening in the story
according to the given pictures. Therefore, as stated by Bitchener (2008), valid text
comparisons can be made because both storylines were related and even seemed a
continuation and had similar characters. For this reason, similar tenses, structures and
vocabulary for both comic strips were expected.
IV.5. Results and discussion
A Kruskal-Wallisi test was run to determine whether there existed significant
differences in the two experimental groups and the control group taking into account
errors on articles in Abbey Time 1, that is, in the first composition the learners had to
write. As can be seen in Table 2, results show no significant differences, a fact that,
from a methodological point of view, is desirable as it indicates that all groups made an
equivalent number of errors (p>0.05 in all three groups).
Table 2. Means and standard deviations for Abbey Time 1.
Group
Mean and standard deviation
Group 1: computer’s feedback
.91
(2.07)
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Teacher’s feedback vs. computer-generated feedback: A focus on articles
Group 2: teacher’s feedback
1.13
(1.35)
Control group
.50
(.75)
As to the first research question, a first analysis was carried out to determine whether
feedback had been useful when students had to write Abbey Time 2 and Pam Time 2
(i.e., when they had obtained feedback after Abbey Time 1 and Pam Time 1). With that
aim in mind, a Wilcoxon signed-rank test ii taking into account the number of errors on
articles between Abbey Time 1 and 2, and between Pam Time 1 and 2 revealed only
statistically significant differences between Pam 1 and 2 for the group who had been
offered teacher’s feedback (Group 1; p=.026). For Group 2 (computer group) and the
Control Group, no significant differences were observed, as Table 3 depicts:
Table 3. Comparison between Time 1 and Time 2 in both compositions.
Group 1 (teacher)
Group 2 (computer)
Control Group
Z (W)
Z (W)
Z (W)
Abbey Time 1 and 2
1.00
.00
.81
Pam Time 1 and 2
2.23
.68
.33
As stated above, only a significant decrease in the number of errors in the use of articles
occurs between Pam 1 and 2 for Group 1. Although both treatment groups at the time of
writing Pam 2 had received feedback three times, in light of our results teacher’s
feedback appears to be more effective as far as linguistic accuracy is concerned, despite
the fact that this feedback was as indirect as the one provided by the computer. In view
of the above results, the effect size was calculated (Cohen’s dii). For Pam Time 1 and 2,
the effect size was large (d=1.024), but the rest of effect sizes ranged from medium to
small.
A second test was used (Wilcoxon signed-rank test) to examine the effect of feedback in
Abbey and Pam at Time 2. Again, as shown in Table 4 below, the analysis reveals only
statistically significant differences for Group 1, that is, it seems that teacher’s feedback
had a positive effect on reducing learners’ errors on articles. One possible explanation
for this finding is that learners tried harder to self-repair before giving their revised
compositions back to their teacher. Maybe they were not so confident about computer’s
79
Tamara Hernández Puertas
feedback and might have felt skeptical about this source of feedback. Still, that is the
only significant difference, since Group 2 and the CG did not show any significant
difference in reducing the number of errors. Our results seem to align with Sauro’s
(2009) research on zero articles. Her two treatment groups received two types of
computer feedback
(recast and metalinguistic information). The indirect type of
feedback (recast) in Sauro’s study and highlighting in the present investigation do not
seem to have an impact on learners’ correction of their errors.
Table 4. Means and standard deviations for Abbey Time 1.
Abbey & Pam Time 2
Z (W)
p
Group 1 (computer)
2.11
.035
Group 2 (teacher)
.37
.70
Control Group
.81
.41
In an overview of the grammar checker Grammarly, Cavaleri and Dianati (2016) report
that 22% of their students agreed that the feedback provided on their writing was not
always helpful, as some of the feedback made no sense for learners. Our participants
may presumably have been in the same situation, finding the feedback too indirect.
As for the second research question, a Wilcoxon test was run. In Group 1, there were no
statistically significant differences
(Z(W)=
1.63; p= .10; d=.25) between the errors
students had made in Abbey Time 2 and Pam Time 2 and the tailor-made tests, showing
a small effect (calculated with Cohen’s d). The same pattern applies to the results for the
computer group and the control group, as there were no significant differences between
the mistakes in Time 2 in both compositions and the tailor-made tests (Z(W)= 1.63; p=
.10; d=.14) for Group 2 and (Z(W)= 1.89; p= .059; d=.40) for the CG, again with a small
to medium effect size.
Despite the fact that, as shown by the results of the first research question, there were
significant differences in the number of errors after teacher’s feedback, this applied only
to immediate gains which were not maintained in the long term, as attested by the
results for the second research question. Neither of the treatment groups showed gains
in accuracy in the tailor-made post-tests. Again, one likely explanation for this result be
80
Teacher’s feedback vs. computer-generated feedback: A focus on articles
the fact that feedback was too indirect and the color codes were too vague and not
showing the learners what to focus on in a more specific way. In this sense, multimodal
combination of text and image (colors, in this case) did not seem to benefit the students’
self-correction process. Although it has been claimed that learners may benefit more
from indirect CF because they need to engage in deeper language processing (van
Beuningen et al. 2008), CF which is too indirect may not reach the desired goals in the
long run. Indeed, Chandler
(2003) found that direct feedback resulted in largest
accuracy gains, both in revisions of previous writings and in subsequent writing,
whereas students who revised their compositions after indirect CF were unable to do so.
A second explanation points to the fact that the compositions learners had to write were
not graded. As a result, their motivation could have been rather low along with the
possibility that they might have got bored of writing four compositions which were very
similar and demanded little creativity.
V. CONCLUSION
Many adult students may have to work autonomously on their language acquisition
process. As shown by the findings of the present study, computer-assisted learning tools
such as Grammar Checker may prove useful in that process, as ‘everything that can be
done to facilitate accurate self-correction is positive’ (Lawley 2016: 879). Still, GC
merely suggests potential problems by highlighting some written bits, thus leaving it up
to students to solve the error. In this vein, computer-generated feedback may have
resulted to be a difficult task for the students who received this type of feedback ‘due to
their learned dependence on teacher-provided feedback’ (Peterson 2017: 48). Moreover,
the effectiveness of computer-generated feedback to highlight aspects such as content or
organization of writings is questionable as humans can assess writings more accurately
than computers (Reiners et al. 2011).
The present study aimed at comparing the impact of teacher’s and computer feedback
on students’ errors, as most errors are repeated among students, which makes the
teacher correct the same error numerous times. In this sense, and despite the above-
mentioned drawbacks of using technology for grammar correction, software such as
81
Tamara Hernández Puertas
Grammar Checker could improve this situation, encouraging students to be more
independent of the teacher and more responsible for their own learning. Benefits may
apply both for the learners and the teacher.
Yet, taking into account the results of this study, we concur with Ware’s (2011) claims
that computer-generated feedback should be seen as a supplement to writing instruction
and not as a replacement, since teacher’s CF, although as indirect as the one delivered
by GC, seemed to work better in reducing the number of errors in the short run. We
adhere to Heift and Hegelheimer’ (2017) recent claims that there is still scant evidence
with regard to whether computer-generated feedback results in accuracy development
and learning over time, pointing to a need of long-term research to determine these
issues.
This piece of research was conducted in authentic classrooms as part of students’
ordinary classes. In this sense, it represents a realistic picture of EFL instruction, which
impacts on its ecological validity, even though some factors, such as students’
commitment during the process may be a handicap. Therefore, as limitations to the
study we can mention the small sample size, which poses questions of generalizability,
and the fact that the feedback provided addressed errors on articles, that is, rule-
governed forms which are more amenable to correction (Lee 2013). The extent to which
other non-rule-governed aspects may benefit from the two types of CF has not been
examined in the present study. Also, the type of indirect feedback offered (highlighting
errors) may prove more useful for students at higher levels of proficiency. Perhaps the
small impact of this kind of feedback in the present study may be due to the proficiency
level of the participants, who could have felt at a loss because of their limited linguistic
competence. Finally, a further limitation refers to the effectiveness of Grammar
Checker, since it depends highly on the teacher and students' attitudes toward computer-
based feedback and their technology-use skills in working with computer-based
programs, because not all teachers and students may be equally skilled.
Notes
i Non-parametric test that compares independent sample of equal of different sample sizes.
ii Non-parametric test used to compare two related samples in this case
82
Teacher’s feedback vs. computer-generated feedback: A focus on articles
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Dikli, S. 2006. “An overview of automated scoring of essays”. Journal of Technology,
Learning, and Assessment, 5 (1), 1-35.
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Ellis, R. 1994. The Study of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Ellis, R. 2009. “A typology of written corrective feedback types”. ELT Journal, 63 (2),
97-107.
Ene, E. and Upton, T. A. 2014. “Learner uptake of teacher electronic feedback in ESL
composition”. System, 46, 80-95.
Evans, N. W., Hartshorn, K. J., McCollum, R. M. and Wolfersberger, M. 2010.
“Contextualizing corrective feedback in second language writing pedagogy”.
Language Teaching Research, 14 (4), 445-463.
Fazio, L. 2001. “The effect of corrections and commentaries on the journal writing
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Ferris, D. R. 1999. “The case for grammar correction in L2 writing classes: A response
to Truscott (1996)”. Journal of Second Language Writing, 8 (1), 1-11.
Ferris, D. R., Chaney, S. J., Komura, K., Roberts, B. J. and McKee, S. 2000.
Perspectives, problems, and practices in treating written error. Colloquium
presented at International TESOL Convention. (March 14-18, 2000).
Ferris, D. R. and Hedgcock, J. 2005. Teaching ESL composition: Purpose, process,
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Ferris, D. R. and Roberts, B. 2001. “Error feedback in L2 writing classes. How
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APPENDIX 1: Sample tailor-made test
87
Tamara Hernández Puertas
Received: 15 March 2018
Accepted: 23 July 2018
Cite this article as:
Hernández Puertas, Tamara 2018. “Teacher’s feedback vs. computer-generated feedback: A
focus on articles”. Language Value 10 (1), 67-88. Jaume I University ePress: Castelló, Spain.
http://www.e-revistes.uji.es/languagevalue.
ISSN 1989-7103
Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors
88
Language Value
November 2018, Volume 10, Number 1 pp. 89-93
ISSN 1989-7103
BOOK REVIEW
Multimodality in Higher Education
Arlene Archer and Esther Odilia Breuer
Brill: Leiden, Boston, 2016. 270 pages.
ISBN: 978-90-04-31205-0
Reviewed by Lucía Bellés-Calvera
IULMA / Universitat Jaume I, Spain
Multimodality in Higher Education, by Archer and Breuer
(2016) deals with
multimodal writing practices and pedagogies in tertiary education. With the boost of
new technologies in the field of education, studies on modes of communication (e.g.
writing) have focused on their evolution throughout the years, particularly in the
learning process.
This book is aimed at educators and researchers who are interested in the writing
communication practices required in a variety of domains, namely architecture,
engineering or cultural studies among others. It is true that Multimodality has become
quite complex in the past few years given that writing is regarded as a means of
knowledge even in practical fields, such as science and media production. In this sense,
this volume could be used as a resource book for those educators who want to reflect on
the relevance of multimodal competencies when conveying a message, especially when
they want to suit students’ needs in the near future. At the same time, the content of the
book is precise and easy to follow as it includes interviews and pictures that can help
readers understand the changes that have taken place in the communication landscape.
Within the introductory chapter, Bezemer and Jewitt (2010: 180) state that the field of
multimodality is one “of application rather than a theory”. This concept has been
present in higher education through pedagogies and texts that involve the use of pictures
and new information and communication technologies (ICTs). Throughout the book,
issues such as academic genres, verbal and non-verbal communication are reviewed.
Other relevant topics are related to teaching writing practices taking into account
Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors
89
Book Review
students’ linguistic and social backgrounds, since these elements will aid them to
construct their academic identities.
The volume consists of 11 chapters grouped in three main sections that explore a
specific theme:
Part 1 accounts for Multimodality in Academia (Chapters 1-4).
Part 2 involves Multimodality in Text Composition (Chapters 5-8).
Part 3 delves into Multimodality across Domains (Chapters 9-11).
The focal point of the first chapter is an interview with Gunther Kress, a well-known
international researcher whose fields of expertise involve education, genre studies, and
multimodality, among others. Kress accounts for four challenges that higher education
is facing at the moment from a multimodal approach, those of knowledge, social,
agency and non-native researchers/students. All of them have to do with what he calls
Umbruch, a German word that stands for a period of change and transition. He points
out the notion of knowledge should be re-examined in higher education institutions,
since writing in the academic field has been the source traditionally accepted. The
“social” has varied, that is, academic disciplines have developed over time, thereby
having an impact on recent research. Chapter 2 illustrates the evolution of the lecture
from a historical point of view. In fact, it presents the different written and spoken
communication practices taking the Middle Ages as a starting point. Hence, it shows
how the role of authority and learners in lectures has adapted to the contemporary era,
which is characterized by the “triumph of the eye over the ear” (Clark, 2006: 36), due to
the introduction of ICTs. In other words, this genre has proven to be flexible in terms of
academic identity and authority as suggested by Thesen (2007, 2009a, 2009b). Lectures
are regarded as a multimodal teaching practice where modes (written, spoken, gaze,
image) interact with each other. The chapter that follows (Chapter 3) departs from a
multimodal analysis of the research monograph. Despite being highly influenced by
written language, figures, tables and other graphic elements are traits of a research
monograph. According to Bateman (2008), its dominant mode is text-flow, which may
vary depending on the discipline. So far, the author delves into two additional concepts
in the chapter: medium and genre, which help to identify multimodal genre patterns
within the Genre and Multimodality model (GeM) (Bateman, 2008). Focusing on this
Language Value 10 (1), 89-93
90
Multilingual Higher Education. Beyond English Medium Orientations
GeM model, several aspects concerning content play a significant role in a research
monograph, such as layout, visuals, cohesive devices and recontextualisation. The first
part of the volume closes with Chapter
4 where the author discusses academic
arguments, paying attention to non-verbal communication (i.e. visuals). Even though
scholars state that images can convey messages on their own, limitations need to be
acknowledged given that these visuals probably need to be supported by some kind of
linguistic content. Hence, the chapter concludes that visuals depend on spoken or
written communication to avoid ambiguous statements.
The second part of the volume is based on text composition from a multimodal
perspective. Chapter 5 reviews the notion of multimodal academic argument, previously
mentioned in Chapter 4. The author looked at the multimodal assignments of first year
undergraduate students enrolled in a History and Theory of Architecture module. By
means of pedagogical implications, the author remarks the need for a multimodal
pedagogy to train educators. Chapter 6 introduces a discussion on how the use of digital
media has not only influenced the emergence of new genres, but also the
reconsideration of the existing ones. Moreover, being familiar with popular culture can
help students produce multimodal texts at university. So far, the social relations
generated by ICTs leads the author to reflect on this issue. Chapter 7 reinforces the idea
that all texts are multimodal to some degree. The author focuses on six art and design
writing projects, carried out by students who were free to combine text and imagery.
However, in this multimodal texts a balance between freedom and restriction as well as
between content and innovation was required. Part 2 of the book ends with Chapter 8,
which emphasizes the need to share one’s voice in academic writing. As it stresses the
ability to display one’s critical thinking as an author, writer identities are key.
According to Clark and Ivanič’s
(1997:
137), there are three identities: a) the
autobiographical self, in which the writer tells his/her life story; b) the discoursal self,
which can be found in higher education and is related to the writer’s field of expertise;
and c) the authorial self, which corresponds to “the writer’s sense of authority or
authorial presence in the text” (p.137). The author claims that providing students with
Image Theatre techniques in writing courses can encourage them to express their
authorial and discoursal selves equally.
Language Value 10 (1), 89-93
91
Book Review
Part 3 of the volume includes Chapters 9, 10 and 11. Chapter 9 analyses intersemiotic
relationships in undergraduate science textbooks, particularly American ones, which
display text and images to make meaning. Including explicit instruction of these
features in academic courses allows students to improve their writing and reading
strategies effectively. Chapter
10 has to do with a case study carried out with
postgraduate international accounting students. Following Halliday’s Systemic
Functional Linguistics (1985), the author describes participants’ multimodal practices in
a Management Accounting module. The fact that international students may have grown
with a different linguistic and cultural background may affect their comprehension in
higher education contexts. Therefore, issues like language (EFL/ESL) and culture need
to be borne in mind. The last chapter
(Chapter
11), based on the Integrative
Multisemiotic Model proposed by Lim (2004), goes into the specific functions of the
written components of Civil Engineering drawings, which are said to carry contextual
meaning. These written components combined with pictures contribute to the overall
meaning-making process.
All things considered, the volume is a good reference to think about the dissemination
of knowledge in higher education from a multimodal approach. The authors do not only
review traditional communication practices in academic settings, but they also include a
variety of texts and visuals explaining the changes they have undergone in our society,
more specifically in higher education institutions.
REFERENCES
Bateman, J. A. 2008. Multimodality and Genre: A Foundation for the Systematic
Analysis of Multimodal Documents. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bezemer, J. and Jewitt, C. 2010. “Multimodal analysis: Key issues”. In Litosseliti, L.
(Ed.), Research Methods in Linguistics. London: Continuum, 180-197.
Clark, W. 2006. Academic charisma and the origins of the research university.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Clark, R. and Ivanič, R. 1997. The Politics of Writing. London: Routledge.
Language Value 10 (1), 89-93
92
Multilingual Higher Education. Beyond English Medium Orientations
Halliday, M. 1985. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold.
Lim, F. V. 2004. “Developing an integrative multi-semiotic model”. In O’Halloran, K.
L. (Ed.), Multimodal Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum, 220-246.
Thesen, L. 2007. “Breaking the frame: Lectures, ritual and academic literacies”.
Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1, 33-53.
Thesen, L. 2009a. Lectures in transition: A study of communicative practices in the
Humanities in a South African university. Unpublished Doctor of Philosophy,
University of Cape Town, Cape Town.
Thesen, L. 2009b. “Researching ‘ideological becoming’ in lectures: Challenges for
knowing differently”. Studies in Higher Education, 34 (4), 391-402.
Received: 26 May 2018
Accepted: 23 July 2018
Language Value 10 (1), 89-93
93
