Multimodality in Distance Education during Covid-19: Teachers’ Perspectives and Practices

Abstract

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the world were forced to take emergency measures in every aspect of life including education. Instead of the prevalent face-to-face mode of teaching, institutions turned to online teaching one by one. This brought many issues along with it. Because of distance education, it became quite challenging for teachers to maintain the multimodal nature of communication. This research aims to examine in-service teachers’ perceptions and actual practices regarding multimodal instruction in online lessons during the COVID-19 pandemic from a descriptive point of view. The research followed an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design. Firstly, to examine the beliefs and preferences of teachers, a 24-item questionnaire (henceforth Multimodal Teaching Questionnaire) that was adapted from a previously developed questionnaire by Bulut et al. (2015) was used. Secondly, 72 hours of distance lessons from 36 teachers were observed via Zoom online conferencing tool. The results showed a discrepancy between the teachers’ statements and their actual practices regarding multimodality. While most of them reported extensive use of multimodality in their instruction, observations showed that in the majority of their lessons, only one or two modes were used.