Qualitative Case Study: Intensive English Program

A qualitative case study will be applied to my inquiry. Three participants from the Intensive English Program (IEP) of a southeastern university will be selected. These three participants are non-native speakers of English from various social, cultural and linguistic background, who come to the US to pursue their higher education degree (Bachelor’s Degree). They are placed in the IEP program to receive intensive training of English and prepare themselves to be qualified to move to the regular degree program offered in the university. There are three criteria for participant selection: first, they need to be non-native speakers of English and have been learning English as an additional language; second, they have never studied in a higher education

Multimodality brings in multiple channels to convey meaning. It includes but is not limited to the following forms of communication such as textual, visual, audio and spatial. Sociocultural researchers claim that all literacies are multimodal because all texts are composed through certain linguistic, visual, or spatial elements that involve various modes of meaning and representation (Kress, 1997; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; New London Group, 1996). That is, in order to make meaning, individuals are encouraged to use multiple resources to design and demonstrate their ways of thinking. In today’s digital world, text-centered communication method has shifted to images-oriented. Jewitt (2008) defines multimodality as meaning “made through the situated configurations across image, gesture, gaze, body posture, sound, writing, music, speech” (p. 246). This indicates that although language is usually considered as the central channel of communication, there are also other routes such as verbal and body language, images, and voice through which individuals’ can represent significant meanings (Kress & Jewitt, 2003; O’Halloran, 2011). In this respect, the ways individuals communicate or make meanings are dependent on the use of various modes that are not limited to language or print alone, but are extended to the use of multiple forms of representations such as visual, audio, spatial and gestural. Given these, today’s literacy practices extend from just reading written text, to reading multimodal texts with images, sounds, and other forms of modalities, and interacts within different social and cultural