A multimodal corpus approach to understanding parliamentary debates: the role of gesture and institutional discourse

Abstract

This contribution aims to contribute to current research on the effects of multimodality on ESP education, with particular reference to the situational context of the university language classroom. Changes in the way society interacts and accesses information as a result of the present move from language-centered texts to multimodal texts, have had a profound impact on education. As a result, in order to adapt and respond to the continuously changing educational landscape, higher education teachers are increasingly obliged to develop new or alternative conceptions of meaning and communication. For this purpose, the primary objective and impetus of this work is to demonstrate how multimodality and the multi-semiotic dimensions of digital communication may be incorporated into an academic ESP curriculum. The study also intends to illustrate how corpus linguistic retrieval of phraseology can be used to enhance ESP language acquisition through research-informed analyses of a multimodal corpus of video clips.