Social Semiotics and Multimodal Assessment of L2 Adult Emergent Readers from Refugee Backgrounds

Abstract

The goals of this action research are to create a feasible set of assessments for refugee background adult emergent readers from non-Western countries, and to gain an understanding of how this population makes meaning from multi- modal texts. The research draws on Critical Applied Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Critical Multimodal Social Semiotics to analyze the multimodal written assessments used by a community ESL language and literacy program. Investigating writing, still image, and layout, data was gathered in three ways: multimodal social semiotic analysis of the assessments, artifact analysis of student assessments, and semi-structured qualitative interviews. Findings are beneficial for assessment and pedagogical practices for adults with refugee backgrounds who have emerging literacy, and are from non-Western countries.