Multimodality in the EFL classroom Multimodalidade na sala de aula de inglês

Abstract: Due to the increased multimodal nature of communication in today’s globalized and culturally diverse world (Christie, 2005), it is paramount to devote attention in the classroom to how semiotic resources (van Leeuwen, 2005) other than verbal language have been used to create identities and to position people socially, especially for the fact that the school plays – or should play – a vital role in people’s individual, social, cultural and political development. In this paper, I contextualize the work with images and present metalanguage from the Grammar of Visual Design (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006) in order to enable teachers to develop activities to foster their students ’ ‘multimodal communicative competence ’ (Royce, 2007; Heberle, 2010). Besides, I carry out analysis of a movie poster so as to put the theory presented into practice