Greek students' familiarity with multimodal texts in EFL

Abstract

This study investigates Greek-speaking, elementary students' familiarity with multimodal texts in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and compares students' ability to retrieve information from multimodal texts before and after a small-scale teaching intervention. We constructed an informal reading comprehension test, which incorporated a multimodal text, that we administered to twenty-three sixth grade students in the provincial city of Trikala, Greece, during the students' EFL lessons. The reading comprehension test was used to explore students' performance both before and after the intervention. We assumed that students' performance would be lower before their exposure to the intervention because of their unfamiliarity with the specific types of texts during their courses. Our initial premise was verified by the results of this study-students received lower test scores before the intervention compared to their scores after the intervention. While some multimodal texts appear in the students' course books, the results indicate that Greek elementary students are not used to working on multimodal texts in EFL. The pedagogical implications that emerge from this study are further discussed in this paper, and the need for further research to substantiate these specific findings is highlighted. © Common Ground, Polyxeni Manoli, Maria Papadopoulou.