Special Issue: Multimodal approaches in ESP: Innovative research and practice

In language teaching, a multimodal approach enhances awareness of semiotic modes beyond verbal language, which can then be leveraged to both comprehend and produce discourse in the target language more effectively on a variety of levels: linguistic, discursive, pragmatic, and cultural. With particular reference to English for Specific Purposes (ESP), learners face additional challenges driven by language and communicative practices associated with specific disciplinary and professional domains. Among these are not only specialized lexico-grammatical features, registers, and genres, but also domain-specific situated and embodied practices that entail multisemiotic processes or “chains of acts, representations and people across spaces and over time” Thus, linguists and practitioners in ESP instructional settings are called upon to devise methods and materials that take into account how multiple semiotic resources contribute to meanings, and then implement them to enhance language learning and foster the multimodal competence associated with the discourse processes of a given specialized domain. The selection, preparation, and application of methods and materials to be used to achieve these objectives can thus benefit from underpinning research that highlights their multimodal/multimedia dimension from various theoretical and analytical perspectives, including multimodal social semiotics and multimodal interaction analysis. The aims of this Special Issue are to 1) advance the current state of knowledge about how multimodal and multimedia resources can be leveraged to improve learning in ESP settings, 2) provide a platform for research that highlights innovative approaches to ESP practice, with a strong focus on application and/or experimentation in the classroom, and 3) offer insights for bridging the traditional gap between smaller-scale and larger-scale multimodal research methods, however, without losing sight of the value of each perspective in the context of ESP. Towards these aims, the contributions in this Special Issue reflect a wide range of methodological approaches to multimodal research and practice—from case studies to corpus-based applications— across diverse specialized discourse domains (i.e., law, business, politics, tourism). This innovative collection of papers thus underscores the important role of multimodal research in ESP, which has thus far been largely missing as traditional ESP research has focused primarily on written texts.