Incidence of Multimodality and Genre-based Pedagogy on Second Grade Students’ Writing of Descriptive Reports

Abstract

Integrating multimodality in the school system poses a challenge for literacy nowadays. Following a discursive genre approach, this article analyses a school genre: The description of a fantastic beast in the 2nd grade of elementary school. Our mainaim is to understand the incidence of multimodality and the teaching-learning cyclein a corpus of 46 written texts dealing with a Descriptive Report genre. The writtenpieces were gathered at a school in Santiago de Chile, where students exhibit poor resultsin writing, social vulnerability, and come from migrant families —most of themfrom Haitian descent. A qualitative analysis of writing is being carried out, based ona pretest and a posttest applied in October 2019. The posttest was used after a TeachingLearning Cycle. In both tests, the stages of the Descriptive Report are observed.A grammatical analysis is carried out at the ideational metafunction level from thetransitivity system, by studying both processes and participants. Additionally,the role played by visual materials to account for the references that were describedis analyzed to understand how the unmarked Theme is realized with an elided subjectfollowing a textual metafunction approach. The main results show multimodalperspective and the teaching-learning cycle helped develop autonomy in the writingprocess. Thus, written productions interpret experience through Relational Processes,by establishing a relationship between the Participant and its characteristics. Finally,the unmarked theme is realized by the elided subject in concordance with the verb.