This comparative research analyses some reflections regarding the teaching and learning approaches designed to foster communicative English language skills under the modality of online education with real-time interaction and multimodal communicative mediation. Because of the global pandemic COVID-19, the higher educational community of three different subjects on English for Specific Purposes (ESP) modified their programs to full online education with different digital tools and interactive methods. A survey was used to analyze students' preferences regarding this abrupt change. Consequently, the delivery of communicative skills through mediated multimodal communication or interaction in English were explored with students' online speaking presentations, which followed the Pecha Kucha model. It is suggested that the multimodal Pecha Kucha speeches allowed participants to produce, receive, interact, and mediate their interpersonal communication with interactive comments, expressed synchronously via MS Teams or posted asynchronously on the forum via written or audio messages.
TopIntroduction
Emergency circumstances, such as the ones experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, have required rapid adaptation to fully online education, which, at the same time, have validated the need for digital literacy. Worldwide face-to-face educational communities shut down their buildings and were hastily transitioned to remote education, keeping in mind the course goals, skills, and evaluations required to accomplish both competences and content (König, Jäger-Biela & Glutsch, 2020; Zhao, Llorente & Gómez, 2021). For long, Computer- or Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (CALL/MALL) programs have allowed English language learners to improve their learning, enhance their linguistic skills, and have helped mediate global interaction between learners by means of technology (Gallardo del Puerto & Gamboa, 2009; González-Lloret, 2003; Shayakhmetova, Mukharlyamova, Zhussupova & Beisembayeva, 2020). Learning a foreign language is a social and intercultural performance. It implies constant interaction with others.
English as a Foreign Language has been mostly performed face-to-face or in blended-learning environments that combine multimodal communicative onsite and offsite tasks with an ample array of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Furthermore, verbal and non-verbal communication are to be successfully delivered during any communication act. It seems necessary to gain further insight into English language courses, designed with a communicative approach and adapted to online education, which encourages learners to perform the communicative competence in English. Moreover, it is assumed that digital literacy is advanced in young higher education learners, who are more used to technologies and devices than their professors and teachers.
What this study seeks to determine is how this global transformation has also evidenced the digital literacy and digital pedagogy of learning communities in tertiary education. For this purpose, the Pecha Kucha (PK) presentation task, also known as a 20x20 (seconds x slides) speech or a lightning talk is the multimodal presentation style used in this study to develop students’ online communicative mediation skills and interaction. Students were encouraged to prepare their speeches in 6.40 minutes with clear and concise information so that they could engage online. This research, therefore, aims at analyzing digital adaptation, multimodal-mediated interaction, and online communication in three English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses in higher education in 2020 and 2021. The research questions are:
RQ1: What are the Spanish students’ preferences regarding the correspondence between digital literacy and this abrupt online English language teaching-learning discourse in higher education?
RQ2: Have the Pecha Kucha presentations served as multimodal communicative tasks to engage in interpersonal interaction and online communicative mediation in English?