Introduction

This section describes multimodality’s role in educating young people, the challenges it poses and the required changes in traditional L2 acquisition theories. It discusses how multimodality can encourage young people to reflect on the vast range of multimodal artefacts, texts and genres, encountered in their daily lives, which they have rarely paused to think about, let alone explored analytically and systematically. Indeed, the main contention is that, through the lens of multimodality and in carefully monitored pedagogic contexts, young people can come to terms with such reflection.