Multimodality in medicine: How university medical students approach informative leaflets

Abstract

This study aims to analyse multimodality in medical leaflets to see how images and other semiotic modes combine with text-flow, adding meaning to the message and broadening the communicative spectrum. Traditionally, in the educational sphere, more importance has been given to text rather than to other semiotic modes but, in fact, writing is also a multimodal practice. In medicine, the visual becomes vital, whether accompanied by meaningful written text or not. The present study analyses 50 medical leaflets designed by first year medical students enrolled in their English for Health Sciences module. The leaflets are a very useful activity integrated as part of their spoken project presentations and include a variety of medical topics, i.e. diabetes, Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), Alzheimer‟s or Huntington‟s disease, among others. Images were considered in terms of type, structural organization, and size. How images combine with text-flow was also observed. The study is an example of how we can apply multimodality to the teaching and learning of languages in the higher education curriculum, proving that multimodality is not only a theory, but also a field of application.