About the Project

We report on the research activities and findings of the NIE/OER Educational Research Funding Programme and MOE CORE 3 project titled 'Integrating Multiliteracies into the English Language Classroom'. The project has two Phases: Phase 1 from March 2019 to December 2019 and Phase 2 from January 2020 to December 2021.

The purpose of this project is first to understand how multiliteracies, specifically multimodal literacy, are currently taught in the English Language subject classroom in Singapore schools and then second, to develop an instructional approach, informed by Systemic Functional Theory, multiliteracies, and multimodality studies, to teach multimodal literacy for upper primary and lower secondary students.

The study adopts a design-based research approach which involved the team of researchers working closely with the teacher-participants in the co-design of lesson packages. The goal of design-based research is to develop contextually-sensitive pedagogical practices and instructional strategies with a focus on the teacherparticipants’ professional learning and growth in the process.

In this project, we present our work with the teacher-participants to co-design multiliteracies learning packages. Based on our findings on the perceptions and practices of teachers and students on the teaching of multiliteracies in Phase 1, we conducted 16 co-design sessions with the six teacher-participants from two secondary and two primary schools and developed six lesson packages as well as one assessment package for tests on multimodal literacy, for both levels. The lesson packages were then trialled by 15 other teachers in the schools and refined by the research team in subsequent iterations.