Reexamining feedback on L2 digital writing

Abstract

The integration of digital multimodal composing (DMC) in the second language (L2)and heritage language (HL) classrooms has expanded our notion of writing, shiftingfrom a focus on the written mode to include other modes of expression (e.g., visual,textual, or aural). Notwithstanding the increasing presence of L2 multimodal learningtasks, which combine different semiotic resources (e.g., language and visual compo-nents such as images or videos) as intrinsic elements used to generate meaning, in-structors have not yet modified the way in which they provide feedback. That is, de-spite the increasing integration of different modes in a multimodal task, instructorsstill focus exclusively on language development – replicating the feedback behaviorsmodeled by non-digital writing assignments – rather than on all the components ofmultimodal texts. In digitally influenced environments and societies, however, thereis a need to reconsider our approaches to feedback to pay greater attention to thelinguistic and nonlinguistic elements of DMC. With the scarcity of research on feed-back in DMC, this article first identifies a gap in multimodal teaching and researchregarding the role and focus on feedback in DMC, and, second, provides an assess-ment rubric from which to base formative feedback that addresses both linguisticand nonlinguistic elements to help students develop their multimodal texts.