Towards developing multimodal literacies in the ESP classroom: methodological insights and practical applications

In this article, we provide an introduction to this special issue of Multimodal Communication entitled “Multimodal approaches in ESP: Innovative research and practice”. The Special Issue showcases innovative research presented at the 2019 International Conference on Knowledge Dissemination and Multimodal Literacy: Research Perspectives on ESP in a Digital Age. After briefly discussing the multimodal approach in language teaching and specifically in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and its key role in developing multimodal competence, each of the five featured contributions is reviewed. The contributions offer theoretically grounded and research-informed applications of the multimodal approach in the ESP classroom.