O uso da multimodalidade em materiais didáticos virtuais dos cursos de graduação de Ensino a Distância- EaD

Abstract

Distance education has established itself as an alternative modality of learning which meets new socio-political-economic demands in the educational field (BRENNAND, 2002). A consequence of this new learning modality is the increased need for virtual learning materials. This paper presents the results of an evaluation of the multimodal resources employed in virtual learning materials, and a discussion of how such use has contributed in the development of virtual learning materials. The background for the study are the linguistic theories on multimodality, such as functionalism, which takes into consideration, for any given communicative situation, the purpose of speech events, as well as the participants and the discursive context involved, i.e., the use of language (Halliday, 1994). The principles of social semiotics were also considered, which focus on the main representational and functional modes expressed in a text, while also trying to investigate and understand the social, historical and cultural factors involved in the production of meaning in any semiotic mode ( HODGE and Kress, 1998; Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996; Halliday, 1978). Social semiotics and functionalism are among the bases upon which the Grammar of Visual Design (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996) was developed, and it proposes similar metafunctions to those found in systemic functional grammar theories. Kress and van Leeuwen’s work is, therefore, the main basis for the analysis of multimodal resources in virtual learning material presented in this paper. The study adopted exploratory-descriptive methods of survey type. Two English disciplines and their respective virtual learning materials were selected for investigation, namely Theories of Language and Second Language and English Language 3B. These disciplines are part, respectively, of the curriculums of the first and third semesters of the blended-modality BA Course in English Language Teaching at the Federal University of Ceará – UFC. In this course, students have both distance classes and regular in situ classes. Three research instruments were used for data collection, a checklist and two questionnaires, which were adapted to the different categories of participants: students, instructors and coordinators. The analysis revealed that three types of language are employed in the virtual learning materials under study: verbal language (83 %), non-verbal (15 %) and verbal-visual (2 %). Therefore, it was concluded that most multimodal resources are expressed by means of verbal language. In addition, it was found that a significant number of multimodal elements relate to the texts of origin through specification (illustration) or through similarity, and have impersonal or neutral functions. Furthermore, it was observed that the specialists from the University in charge of designing the virtual materials decide to change or withdraw from the text some of their multimodal resources, at the moment of their insertion in the virtual environment. This process results in the loss of some of the original meaning of the texts. There is also a small percentage of multimodal features which are not part of the social context of the readers, making it difficult to understand the content of the teaching material. Finally, it was found that the multimodal resources are well distributed and organized on the computer screen. From all that, it can be concluded that it is essential that all parties involved in the process virtual learning materials design have the necessary linguistic knowledge, especially concerning social semiotics. It is also important that material designers take the social and cultural background of the student into consideration in order to create efficient materials and that the possibility of purposeful insertion of other multimodal features in the text is considered as a way to contribute for the construction of textual meaning.