Evaluating the research trend on the application of multimodal approach in ESL classrooms

Abstract

The growing needs for employing multimodality in teaching have sparked research activities all around the world. Due to its broad range of applications, multimodality has received a lot of attention as an approach to be applied in any fields specifically in education. This bibliometric study aimed to evaluate the global research trends in applying multimodality to ESL classrooms based on publication outputs, co-authorships among authors and affiliated countries, and co-occurrences of author keywords. A total of 1303 journal articles published between 1972 and 2022 were retrieved using the Scopus database. The results demonstrate that the number of publications has been steadily increasing since 1972. Approximately 29% of the global total publications were contributed by researchers from the United States and the TESOL Quarterly published the greatest number of articles related to research on the multimodal approach in ESL classrooms. The findings of this review show that the application of multimodality to ESL classrooms may eventually supplant the clusters that dominated multimodality research in the past. In conclusion, the recent progress in implementing the multimodal approach in ESL classrooms includes the following, but not limited to, i) teaching strategies, ii) teaching environments, and iii) teaching and learning with educational technology.