ABSTRACT
Multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) has emerged to account for non-linguistic semiotics, for example, embodied meanings such as gesture and gaze or spatiality, that occur alongside, or even displace, language-in-use. While multimodalities of classroom discourse have been previously explored, there are few MDA studies of foreign language or second language classrooms. The chapter seeks to widen the frame of multimodal inquiry, since MDA is particularly suited to help foreign language teacher-researchers understand how students and teachers make meaning beyond words. It first introduces the key concepts of MDA, profiles findings from prior classroom MDA studies, and contrasts MDA with other approaches that also consider non-linguistic modalities. Using data from an ongoing study of the curriculum genre of classroom individual feedback consultations found in two Japanese tertiary English as a foreign language courses, the chapter profiles classroom multimodality in terms of spatial orientation, gesture and gaze. It also focuses on their systemic, functional character and proposes new systems and metafunctionality for the analysis of gaze. It closes with proposals for further research in multimodality in the foreign language classroom, taking into account the challenges of analysing data from multilingual, multicultural settings.
