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The International Baccalaureate Organisation (IBO, 2020a) recently introduced the concept of “multimodality” in the Language Acquisition Guide put into use from September 2020 to January 2021 for the Middle Years Programme (MYP) designed for students aged between 11 and 16. In IB education, Language Acquisition, previously known as Second Language, includes nearly 80 additional languages for students to learn from ab initio level up to a high level. According to the new Guide (IBO, 2020a), “multimodality implies that a message or composition consists of multiple modes. Navigating multimodal texts requires students to attend to the grammars of visual design, in addition to the structures, typography, and graphic elements associated with written language.” (p. 12). It has interpreted what “multimodal texts” contain and how multimodal texts should be used in achieving the learning objectives in listening, speaking, reading and writing respectively. As can be seen, this document has explicitly signalled a “multimodal turn” (Goodling, 2014; Tan, Zammit, D'Warte, & Gearside, 2020) in language teaching and learning in the IB curriculum, calling teachers in every language discipline to reconceptualise not only how to teach languages but also what to teach students. Following the publication of the new language Guide, a Language Acquisition Teacher Support Material (IBO, 2020b) was made available to give practical help to support teachers’ understanding of multimodal texts and new assessment criteria to be used from May 2022 onwards. At this point, understanding how language teachers perceive multimodality and how they implement multimodality into their everyday pedagogy is essential to the success of language teaching in the international education context. This study can be of immediate relevance to other educational systems in which multimodal learning and testing are becoming the trend of the future.
However, based on the findings of two recent review studies on digital multimodal composition research (Smith, Pacheco & Khorosheva; 2021; Zhang, Akoto & Li, 2021), there has been a dearth of research on how teachers explore the concepts of multiliteracies and multimodality while developing pedagogies to transform their teaching practices to establish a more long-term and sustainable practice rather than through a one-off experiment. Equally scarce in existing research is multimodal teaching in languages other than English, which limits the scope of our knowledge and multimodal project designs to alphabetical languages based on the Latin script. Languages such as Chinese with unique writing systems and different input systems on electronic devices have not received adequate attention in digital multimodal writing research (Li, 2020; Xu, Jin, Deifell & Angus, 2021). Against the backdrop of an ongoing major curriculum transformation in IB education with a particular focus on Chinese language teaching, this study aims to explore how a lead teacher of Chinese forayed into multiliteracies practices and multimodal pedagogies through a full circle of lived experience on a volunteer basis over one year of teaching and professional learning.