Literacy skills

Multimodal Discourse is a theory of communication in multimedia. The notion of modes refers to semiotic resources which allow the simultaneous realization of discourses and types of (inter)action. Media are the material resources being used for the production such as music, language, and images. This study examined Iranian EFL learners’ perception of multimodal texts. The objective of the study was to examine how Iranian EFL learners utilized their general literacy practices and multimodal repertoires to develop their meaning-making process. The participants were 18 intermediate EFL learners attending Iran Language Institute (ILI), and were exposed to advertisement materials. They were asked to reconstruct their perceptions both visually and verbally. The participants’ responses were analyzed according to the social semiotics model suggested by Kress and van Leeuwen (2001). Results revealed that the participants made contextualized perceptions of the advertisement materials indicating their sociocultural framework. Moreover, applying multimodal knowledge, the students promoted their learning status via transformative self-affected strategies. Multimodal/multiliteracies pedagogy could promote EFL students' critical literacy practices to develop new worldviews and question the imposing discursive moments.

While there is a growing interest in poetry writing, it is important to explore students' experiences of writing poetry related to their meaningful lived experiences in an English as a Foreign Language setting. The study aims to investigate students' perceptions, emotions, and desires toward the activity of autobiographical poetry writing. Valid responses were obtained from 143 EFL students through a Qualtrics online survey, which examined their experiences in composing autobiographical poetry and its impact on their perceptions, emotions, and desire to learn poetry. The participants came from ten universities across various regions in Indonesia. Descriptive statistics and thematic analysis revealed that participants perceive writing autobiographical poetry to be a challenging experience due to technical language and poetic style. They also demonstrated a range of emotions, notably fear and anxiety, despite believing that the activity is beneficial. Although most of them experienced many challenges in autobiographical poetry writing, they expressed a desire to continue learning how to write poetry in the future. Participants were able to express their personal experiences in meaningful ways through their poems despite their anxiety about poetry writing. Hence, this study can serve as a stepping stone toward integrating poetry into Indonesian EFL curricula as a form of meaningful literacy

This paper explores the ways in which the transfer of assumptions from first language (L1) writing can help the process of writing in second language (L2). In learning second language writing skills, learners have two primary sources from which they construct a second language system: knowledge and skills from first language and input from second language. To investigate the relative impact of first language literacy skills on second language writing ability, 60 EFL students from Tabriz Islamic Azad University were chosen as participants of this study, based on their language proficiency scores. The subjects were given two topics to write about: the experimental group subjects were asked to write in Persian and then translate their writing into English. The control group wrote in English. The results obtained in this study indicate that the content and vocabulary components of the compositions were mostly affected by the use of first language.