Virtual Reality-mediated literacy: introducing a new multimodal literacy for meaning-making

Submitted by: Maria Christoforou
Abstract: This proposal is part of a PhD study in progress, and explores how Virtual Reality (VR) can transform the instruction of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), specifically in the course “English for Fine Arts”, foregrounding the embodied and multimodal dimensions of foreign language learning. Traditional ESP instruction often centers on decontextualized linguistic practice with emphasis on logocentric texts (Christoforou, 2022), yet VR enables a multimodal, immersive learning experience (Jauregi-Ondarra et al., 2024) that challenges these conventions. In this study, students engage in simulated Fine Arts experiences: the first environment provides an embodied, simulated navigation within Salvador Dali’s painting “Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet’s Angelus” and the second environment enables students to create multimodal compositions in a 360-degree space, allowing students to transfer their knowledge in a new context (Lim & Tan-Chia, 2022). Apart from language, students also incorporate gestures, spatial awareness, visual cues, and interaction with virtual artifacts. As a result, language becomes sensorial, rooted in experience, movement, and perception, rather than abstract or detached from context. Multimodality emerges as a critical response to newness (Kress, 2003), offering a lens through which we understand language learning as a material, embodied, and situated process. Students’ linguistic performance is co-constructed through the interplay of bodies, immersive spaces, and artifacts, merging language and literacy. By examining students’ recorded think-aloud interviews in the VR environment, and their written description of pre- and post-texts, the aim of this paper is to explore how their understanding and use of English shifts since literacy extends beyond reading and writing to encompass doing, sensing, and creating. As a result, learners become designers of meaning, and their multimodal outputs, both verbal and non-verbal, become artifacts of learning.
Through an action research framework involving two rounds of VR-based interventions, we investigate how VR introduces Virtual Reality-mediated literacy, not only in terms of the tool, but also in terms of how students conceive of literacy, language, and learning itself through embodiment (Mills et al., 2022). This embraces “new technical stuff” (what VR technology can offer) and the “new ethos stuff” (how it can change learning) (Lankshear & Knobel, 2011). This research aims to contribute to the way education responds to newness by embracing multimodal pedagogies and redefining literacies.






References:
Christoforou, M. (2022). University students ’ transformation of meanings within an ESP digital context. Professional and Academic English, 29(2), 23–47.


Christoforou, M., & Efthimiou, F. (2023). Introducing Dreams of Dali in a Tertiary
Education ESP Course: Technological and Pedagogical Implementations. In Zaphiris, P., & Ioannou, A. (Eds.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Vol. 14041. Learning and Collaboration Technologies. HCII 2023. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34550-0_4


Jauregi-Ondarra, K., Meijerink, J., & Christoforou, M. (2023). Using high-immersion
social virtual reality environments for researching interculturality. In Sadeghi, K. (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Technological Advances in Researching Language Learning (pp. 403-419). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003459088-36


Kress, G. (2003). Literacy in the New Media Age. Routledge.
Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2011). The New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning (3rd ed.). Open University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/deafed/enj039

Lim, F.V., & Tan-Chia, L. (2022). Designing Learning for Multimodal Literacy:
Teaching Viewing and Representing (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003258513


Mills, K. A., Scholes, L., & Brown, A. (2022). Virtual Reality and Embodiment in
Multimodal Meaning Making. Written Communication, 39(3), 335-369.
https://doi.org/10.1177/07410883221083517


Maria Christoforou is a PhD Candidate researching the pedagogical use of Virtual Reality (VR) in English language learning. She holds an MA in Applied Linguistics from the Open University, UK, and a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Cyprus. She has taught English in secondary and tertiary education, and since 2012 she has been involved in the teaching of ESP and curriculum development at the Cyprus University of Technology. She has participated in High Immersion Social VR intercultural projects and she is also the representative of EuroCALL in Cyprus. Her interests include VR-assisted language learning (VRALL), immersive technologies, and multimodality.


Elena Ioannidou is Associate Professor in Language Education at the University of Cyprus. She holds a BA in Education (University of Cyprus), and an MA and PhD in Applied Linguistics and Sociolinguistics (University of Southampton, UK). A trained ethnographer, her research focuses on sociolinguistics, multilingualism, language and identity, and linguistic ethnography. She explores language as performance and its links to social groupings and networks. Her pedagogical interests include literacy, genre-based education, and metalinguistic awareness. She has led EU- and nationally funded projects, is a founding member of the Literacy Association of Cyprus, and served on the board of the Linguistic Society of Cyprus.