Digital multimodal PechaKucha presentations in ESP: insights from students’ learning experiences

Abstract

Advances in digital and audiovisual communication have contributed to the remediation and emergence of genres (Luzón and Pérez-Llantada 2022, giving rise to new discourse practices. Against this backdrop, it becomes important to review ESP pedagogy to better prepare students to communicate effectively in professional settings. For this purpose, ESP teachers should move beyond traditional literacy to embrace multimodality and develop students’ multimodal literacy. This study presents a multimodal genre-based approach to teaching PechaKucha (PK) presentations (Querol-Julián and Beltrán-Palanques 2021) and reports on students’ learning experiences. This pedagogical approach allowed students to explore the genre of PK presentations and reflect on how to construct their own version. The recipients of this approach were 127 ESP students, of which 44 voluntarily completed a survey purposely designed to explore their learning experiences regarding the preparation and performance of a digital PK presentation. Findings suggest that students made a great effort to effectively construct a digitalised PK mainly because of the format requirements. The students were faced with the challenge of making decisions about what and how to represent ideational, textual, and interpersonal meanings through a PK. Finally, this study suggests that students seemed to have become aware of the complexity of expressing meanings through the multimodal genre of PK presentations.