In times of COVID, communication has shifted from a face-to-face setting to a virtual one. Besides being a source of social interaction, that accompanies also those who had to switch to a remote way of working. That is what happened to me. I am a teacher of EFL (English as a Foreign Language), and one important ally to me at the moment is Zoom – a platform that allows virtual meetings, providing a range of multimodal functions.

This is the basic layout of the program. Taking into consideration Kalantzsi and Cope’s (2012) modes of meaning – those being: oral, written, visual, spatial, tactile, gestural, and audio meanings – it is possible to use most or all those modes during one meeting, depending on one’s purpose. During a normal class of mine, I usually start greeting my student and talking about the days we have not seen each other and recalling previous classes’ content. At this moment, at least, oral, visual, spatial, and gestural meanings are being produced by both me and the student.

Proceeding, I can, for instance, project a powerpoint presentation or play a video or open a website. Each one of those will deal with specific types of modes. I can also write on the chat a word the student might not have understood orally (again, a contrast between modes). The possibilities are numerous, not to mention the range of modes that are contained in each of these supports (website, slides, video…).

Hence, multimodality - and that, for me, became even more tangible now in this social distancing - is essential in the process of meaning-making and of building knowledge. I cannot imagine how it would be to teach a class in a monomodal perspective, only by audio, for instance. Thus, oral and written languages (as it was previously the notion of literacy) revels itself as insufficient to fully comprehend how meaning is perceived when it goes from the representation of the speaker to communication with others (Kress, 2009), as this communication is composed of intonation, of structure, yes, but also of gestures, of space, and so on, and when one isolates one of those, like it is the possibility to do when talking remotely, is when one sees how thorough meaning can be.

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Kalantzis, M; Cope, B. Literacies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Kress, Gunther. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communcation. London: Routledge, 2009.