A Metafunctional Framework for Visual Analysis in English as an Additional Language (EAL) Digital Multimodal Composition
Dissertation Proposal Title: A Metafunctional Framework for Visual Analysis in English as an Additional Language (EAL) Digital Multimodal Composition
Dissertation Committee Members: Dr. Shelley Staples (Chair), Dr. Beatrice Dupuy, Dr. Jon Reinhardt, Dr. Chris Tardy
This dissertation proposal presentation will be a hybrid presentation. For those who want to attend in person, please go to ML 504. For those who want to attend via Zoom, the link is https://arizona.zoom.us/j/84541747721
Dissertation Abstract: Students are increasingly asked to compose multimodally, using images, emojis etc., alongside written text (Hafner, 2015; Jiang & Hafner, 2024), yet little is known about how EAL (English as an Additional Language) students use these visual resources to construct identity and connect with audiences (Anderson & Kachorsky, 2019). Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) visual grammar and D'Angelo's (2016) study of academic posters provide useful tools for analyzing how visual resources represent content and organize information, but neither framework fully accounts for the interpersonal work visual resources can perform, including expressing attitude, constructing identity, and connecting with readers, particularly through resources such as emoji, memes, and personal images that these frameworks were not designed to describe.
Drawing on Halliday's (1978, 1994) metafunctional theory and register-functional theory (Biber et al., 2021), this study develops a framework for analyzing how EAL students use visual resources to realize ideational, textual, and interpersonal meaning, with particular attention to the interpersonal categories that emerge inductively from their compositions. Using multimodal texts from the Corpus and Repository of Writing (CROW), spanning two multimodal genres namely genre redesign infographics and portfolio reflections, the study examines how these three functions are distributed across genres and whether that distribution corresponds to patterns in students' lexico-grammatical choices. This analysis explores whether visual meaning-making, like linguistic meaning-making, responds systematically to situational demands. The resulting framework offers a model for analyzing visual meaning-making in student writing more broadly, with implications for how multimodal composing is assessed in EAL classrooms.
