PechaKucha Presentations to Develop Multimodal Communicative Competence in ESP and EMI Live Online Lectures: A Team-Teaching Proposal

Abstract

With the Covid-19 outbreak, many universities worldwide have been forced to undertake some changes to continue with the academic commitment, giving rise to a range of adaptations that pivoted around online teaching delivery and the use of technology and audiovisual materials. Against this background, this study discusses an adaptive response from face-to-face to live online lectures for ESP and EMI classrooms. These two settings are deliberately chosen as a way to best prepare ESP learners for EMI courses. For this purpose, the spoken genre of PechaKucha has been selected, which is characterized as a multimodal (e.g., language, visuals, images) and engaging presentation type. To deal with this genre and promote learners’ multimodal communicative competence and multimodal literacy, we drawn on a multimodal-centered genre-based pedagogy. This proposal explains the pedagogical adaptation from face-to-face to online lectures and discusses the challenges confronted when moving from one setting to the other. We also argue for a team-teaching approach. In addition, this study points to the need to train teachers to develop their multimodal interactional competence to equip them to cope with live online delivery.