Jian-E PENG
Jian-E Peng is Professor of English in the College of Liberal Arts, Shantou University. She holds a PhD from the University of Sydney. She has been the principal investigator on two research projects funded by the National Social Science Research Fund, China, and one project funded by the Ministry of Education, China. Her research interests include learner motivation, multimodal discourse analysis, academic writing, teacher development, and research methodology. Her main works include two books, three book chapters, and papers published in Language Learning, TESOL Quarterly, System, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Linguistics and Education, ELT Journal, Asia-Pacific Education Researcher, and Sage Open.
Learning through ‘talking’ has been widely accepted to be essential in second language (L2) acquisition. The first step to promote students’ classroom participation should be creating among them a willingness to communicate (WTC) using the L2. L2 WTC refers to learners’ readiness to enter into L2 discourse with specific persons in specific situations. Research into WTC among students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) has been continually thriving due to the often-observed low WTC among these students. A multitude of classroom factors (e.g., teaching style, topics, and interlocutors) have been found to influence classroom WTC. However, human communication is fundamentally multimodal, which involves not only language but also other semiotic resources such as gesture, facial expression, and visual image. Hitherto scarce attention has been given to exploring how L2 WTC is lived out in classroom multimodal discourse, which largely requires interdisciplinary approaches. L2 WTC research is conventionally situated in applied linguistics and employs empirical methods such as questionnaire surveys and interviews that prioritize participants’ emic perspectives, whereas the analysis of interpersonal meanings construed in multimodality often draws on theories or approaches generally falling under the linguistic paradigm, such as the systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA) approach. This presentation reports on a project that explored L2 WTC as embedded in multimodal discourse in university EFL classrooms in China by means of classroom observations, stimulated recall interviews, a questionnaire survey, SF-MDA of the teacher’s verbiage, gesture, and facial expression, and analysis of visual grammar in teaching slides. Based on the convergent and divergent evidence obtained through these interdisciplinary approaches, I propose that while integrating applied linguistics and linguistics perspectives is challenging, it is promising for advancing disciplinary knowledge and for language practitioners to recognize and orchestrate multimodal semiotic resources to enhance students’ WTC and classroom participation.