Developing Professional Communication: The Construction of a Multimodal Understanding of Job Interviews

Abstract

This article explores how online videos with a pedagogical focus can possibly make an impact on our current language teaching and learning practices. The affordance of videos to create multimodal content that can be shared with the public allows content creators to use a wide range of resources, such as spoken and written language, gestures, screen layout, etc., to create learning environments that can promote an awareness of a multimodal perspective to the understanding of a particular kind of professional communication context, such as job interviews, as illustrated in this article. By analyzing a series of videos on job interviews using multimodal semiotic analysis, I argue that these videos, which I call pedagogical vlogs, are helpful not only in terms of teaching the language skills required for job interviews, but also to help create a multimodal understanding of job interviews through the strategic orchestration of multiple semiotic modes. The popularity of pedagogical vlogs, as well as their affordance to provide lesson content created by the public, offer new possibilities for language teaching and learning, but it has yet only received scant attention from applied linguistics and language education researchers. This article aims to start a dialog on the pedagogical implications of this new form of learning so as to uncover the potentials offered by pedagogical vlogs in education.