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Given the multimodal realities and radical changes in the current communication environment, multimodal writing practice captures increasing attention in the area of writing studies. Writing, reconceptualized as multimodal composing, provides rich opportunities for writers to deploy multiple resources (e.g., linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, and spatial) to make meaning, construct knowledge, and express self-identity (Belcher, 2017). Students’ authentic writing happening outside the classroom, in the digital space, has been increasingly multimodal during this decade (e.g., Ajayi, 2010; Vandommele, Van den Branden, Van Gorp & De Maeyer, 2017). In L2 writing contexts, students are now engaged in digital multimodal writing (DMC) projects, including blogging, digital storytelling, and video-making (Hafner & Miller, 2011; Yi & Angay-Crowder, 2016), in which they “orchestrate” various semiotic resources to create digital products that combine “a plurality of signs in different modes into a particular configuration to form a coherent arrangement” (Kress, 2010, p. 162). DMC in L2 writing contexts is still under-explored, despite a surge of interest in the last few years due to further development of digital technologies and more multisemiotic digital input in L2 learners’ life (Belcher, 2017; Halfner, 2014; Street, Pahl, & Rowsell, 2011).
This article begins with a brief explanation of DMC, followed by the rationales for implementing DMC, and then addresses the main questions that guided this research review.
Definition of DMC
The central concept for digital multimodal composing (DMC) is “multimodality”, which is defined as the use of different modes, i.e., textual, aural, linguistic, spatial, and visual, for communication and meaning-making (Kress, 2003). In 21st-century social and cultural contexts, meanings are increasingly represented and communicated multimodally- with images, sounds, space, and movement (Kress, 2010). The paradigm shift in terms of writing representation moves from the logic of the page to the logic of the screen (Kress, 2003), which coincides the visual turn in writing studies: seeing texts as visual and treating images as texts (Purdy, 2014). Although multimodal does not always mean digital (Miller-Cochran, 2017), computer-based digital technologies have offered us new and easy access to multimodal communication. Thus, this article focuses on the recent literature on DMC. Its operationalized definition in this article is that students draw on digital technologies and create multimodal writing products, combining text, images, sound, video, and/or hypertext, to address a wide audience through various genres.