Graduation Year

2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

World Languages

Major Professor

Matt Kessler, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Larissa D'Angelo, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Camilla Vásquez, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Wei Zhu, Ph.D.

Keywords

Digital Multimodal Composing, Investment, L2 Acquisition, Multimodality

Abstract

Despite the calls for integrating digital multimodal composing (DMC) into second language (L2) pedagogy, learners’ gains in terms of L2 development beyond writing remain largely unexplored. Additionally, while research points to the potential of DMC to promote students’ engagement and motivation in the L2 classroom (e.g., Hava, 2021; Hull & Nelson, 2005; Shin & Cimasko, 2008), learners’ investment (Darvin & Norton, 2015, 2023; Norton, 1995) in L2 learning through DMC has been underrepresented in previous literature. In addition, DMC research on investment until now has almost exclusively focused on the learning of English as a foreign or second language (e.g., Jiang, 2018; Kendrick et al., 2022; Zuo, 2024).

Taking a mixed-methods approach, this quasi-experimental study investigated the implementation of a DMC-inspired curriculum with undergraduate L2 Italian learners. Specifically, this study explored two research questions (RQs), including (RQ1) the effectiveness of DMC on multiple L2 domains (i.e., overall achievement, writing, speaking, listening, reading, grammatical accuracy), and (RQ2) whether the nature of the collaborative task (i.e., monomodal vs DMC) may differently impact students’ investment in L2 learning. The study participants (N = 29) were gathered from two sections of a 15-week undergraduate beginning Italian course at a U.S. university, with one section serving as a comparison group and the other as an experimental group. Throughout the semester, all students engaged in three collaborative writing tasks: essays for the comparison group and video projects for the experimental group.

For RQ1, independent samples t-tests comparing students’ scores on two end-of-semester assessments (i.e., speaking exam, final written exam) showed that the experimental group performed significantly better than the comparison group on various L2 skills, including grammatical accuracy, speaking, and language use in writing, with medium and large effect sizes. For RQ2, a thematic analysis of the data (i.e., surveys, interviews, artifacts, final products) revealed that the nature of the task differently impacted students’ investment. Investment differed in terms of the resources which students invested in acquiring or contributed throughout the learning process (e.g., linguistic, interpersonal, digital), the identities they developed (e.g., as L2 learners, relational identities), and the challenges faced (e.g., workload distribution, technical issues).

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