Speaker's Abstract
_edited.jpg)
Lianjiang (George) Jiang
Assistant Professor
Academic Unit of Language and Literacy Education, Faculty of Education
The University of Hong Kong
Title:
"Teaming with GenAI for EMI teachers’ multimodal feedback literacy development"
At a time when English Medium Instruction (EMI) learners can get automated feedback on their writing from generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), it is imperative to re-envision the role of EMI teachers in the feedback process. In this paper, we argue that multimodal feedback literacy for EMI teachers in this GenAI-ubiquitous world requires them to forge strategic teaming with GenAI to provide feedback on both language use and multimodal synergy, orchestrating multiple feedback-giving modes into coherent feedback ensembles to facilitate optimal feedback uptake from diverse learners. Grounded in the social semiotic tradition of multimodality, we challenge the conventional understanding of feedback communication as language-centered and advocate an alternative conceptualization of feedback communication as multimodal. We are against the narrow conceptualization of GenAI as a tool for generating linguistic feedback and argue that feedback automation through GenAI would dehumanize its learning potential and undermine the agency of EMI teachers as feedback designers. We then, in addition to the GenAI-led automation and human-led assistant models of using GenAI, present three pathways for EMI teachers to team up with GenAI for multimodal feedback design and multimodal feedback literacy development. The three pathways include (1) expanding feedback in the linguistic mode to feedback in multiple modes, (2) expanding feedback target from how language is used to how multimodality is used, and (3) giving analytics-informed and process-oriented multimodal behavioral feedback.