Enhancing multimodal literacy: puppetry for English-speaking skills development

Abstract

The exponential increase of multimodal literacy in language learning in classroom contexts has insisted teachers reconstruct their roles. Teachers should be equipped with a number of different quality and ability to deliver meaningful lessons by incorporating technology and embedding moral education in the learning process. However, there is a void left out from many previous studies on integrating traditional art performance into English language learning which caters to the tasks aforementioned. Therefore, this qualitative descriptive study explores resources used by the English teacher to construct meaning to enhance students’ speaking skills. The data of the study were in the form the multimodal products to teach speaking skills. The data were collected through participant observations where one of the researchers played the role as the teacher. The findings reveal the use of different modes of texts including a printed comic page, a story audiotape, and printed puppet characters to help students gain confidence to speak in English and reinforce creativity and fluency in performing a puppet show in English. It was also evident that the activities chosen by the teachers have promoted the students’ enthusiasm in responding to the puppet story which enables them to learn some values from it while improving their speaking skills.

Keywords

• Puppetry
• multimodal literacy
• English language learning
• communication skills
• interactive learning
• educational innovation