Exploring Undergraduate Students’ Experiences Reading Multimodal Texts in an EFL Reading Classroom: Evidence from Indonesia
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Abstract
Despite a plethora of research interest in teaching reading over the past few years, scant attention has been paid to exploring undergraduate students’ experiences of reading multimodal texts in the EFL landscape. This study seeks to fill this gap by capturing undergraduate students’ experiences of enacting the role of reader-viewers as text navigators, designers, interrogators, and interpreters of multimodal texts in an EFL academic reading course where the first author served as the instructor. Five undergraduate students (two females, aged 19–20 years) were recruited as participants in this study. Data were derived from the students’ narrative frames, a story template consisting of incomplete sentences and a blank space to capture their experiences of reading multimodal texts. The data were qualitatively analyzed using content analyses. The findings demonstrated that the use of a narrative frame enabled the students to reflect on and explore their experiences of enacting the reader-viewer in multimodal texts. Drawing on the findings, this study suggests that undergraduate students expand their reading practice by enacting the reader-viewer role in multimodal texts, thereby enabling them to develop multimodal reading competence.
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