Editorial: Multimodality in Face-to-Face Teaching and Learning: Contemporary Re-Evaluations in Theory, Method, and Pedagogy

Thomas Amundrud^1*Brahim Azaoui^2*George Cremona^3*Charalampia Hara Sidiropoulou^4*

• ¹Nara University of Education, Nara, Japan
• ²Universite de Montpellier, Montpellier, France
• ³L-Universita ta' Malta, Msida, Malta
• ⁴Panepistemio Dytikes Makedonias, Kozani, Greece

Building upon this prior work, this research topic highlights the diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches that characterizes the broad field of multimodality. It includes multimodal studies from around the world, including formal pedagogic contexts ranging from primary school to university, as well as a school for migrant and refugee children, and extends beyond traditional classrooms to include parent-child and professor-student office hour interactions. As such, this research collection provides a slice in time on the state of multimodal classroom research in the early 21st century.Since multimodality transcends disciplinary boundaries and research traditions (e.g. Jewitt, 2009;Seizov & Wildfeuer, 2017), this research topic features contributions from multiple fields within multimodal studies, including gesture studies, multimodal Conversation Analysis, multimodal interaction analysis, and social semiotics. In their study of learner interactions in a school for migrant and refugee children in Greece, Tsikou and Papadopoulou explore how to enhance individuals' multimodal awareness, emphasizing its role in daily interactions and potential for intercultural misunderstandings. Their analysis of children's evolving "tactics" and "ways of doing" (de Certeau, 1990) highlights the need for reflection on communication strategies. Using video-stimulated recall interviews, they show how fostering this awareness can empower refugee and migrant children in utilizing their communicative resources. In his multimodal conversation analytic (e.g. Streek et al, 2011) study examining both audiovisual recordings as well as scanned assessment materials of K-12 reading assessments using commercially produced materials at an international school in Japan, Tomasine examines the practice of documenting feedback, or how teachers and students collaboratively create assessment interactions, both materially and discursively. Tomasine shows how, in formal, formative reading assessments in an elementary school, the degree to which participants focused on the formal assessment itself affected the record of the talk-in-interaction that was being assessed. Continuing to examine traditional educational contexts outside of formal teaching, Opazo et al's study investigates gesture alignment (Pickering & Garrod, 2006) in teacher-student office hour consultations conducted in English as a lingua franca. Analyzing 12 sessions with Spanish students and English-speaking lecturers, the researchers found that gestures were most often copied consecutively, mainly by teachers. Gesture alignment helped achieve mutual understanding, especially in L1-L2 contexts, and was driven by recurrent gesture forms. It played roles in negotiation, agreement, and clarifying meaning in academic interactions.Lopez-Ozieblo's study explores whether gestureenriched grammatical explanations, grounded in a cognitive linguistics approach (e.g., Larsson & Stolpe, 2023), can benefit native speakers' understanding of language structures through multimodality. Addressing a research gap regarding use of gesture to teach abstract concepts, it shifts focus from vocabulary and phonetics to how young adult learners develop grammatical understanding. The study contributes to ongoing discussions through findings from an action-research project conducted in a naturalistic, multimodal learning environment. Finally, Tirosh and Chitrit explore mother-child interactions during joint computer gameplay, examining how maternal scaffolding occurs in informal, home-based digital settings. Using multimodal interaction analysis (e.g., Norris, 2004) In closing, these five contributions highlight the theoretically varied and methodologically rich field that is the study of multimodality in face-to-face learning environments. While this collection does not feature any explicit comparison or critique of one approach against others, and is not a complete depiction of all studies of pedagogic interaction that have been called multimodal, it nevertheless provides an essential snapshot of the state of the art in this broad field.The editors would like to thank all contributors for their submissions. We would also like to acknowledge the community created through the Facebook Multimodal Researchers group, where the four Co-Editors met in response to a call for interest from Thomas Amundrud, and without which this multinational collaboration could not have occurred.