14th METU International ELT Convention ‘Reflections’, Ankara, Türkiye, 17 Haziran 2022, cilt.1, ss.1
With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, governments around the world
were forced to take emergency measures in every aspect of life including
education. Instead of the prevalent face-to-face mode of teaching, institutions
turned to online teaching one by one. This brought many issues along with it.
Because of distance education, it became quite challenging for teachers to
maintain the multimodal nature of communication. This research aims to examine
in-service teachers’ perceptions and actual practices regarding multimodal
instruction in online lessons during the Covid-19 pandemic from a descriptive
point of view. The research followed an explanatory sequential mixed-methods
design. Firstly, to examine the beliefs and preferences of teachers, a 24-item
questionnaire (henceforth Multimodal Teaching Questionnaire) that was adapted
from a previously developed questionnaire by Bulut et al. (2015) was used.
Secondly, 72 hours of distance lessons from 36 teachers were observed via Zoom
online conferencing tool. The results showed a discrepancy between the
teachers’ statements and their actual practices regarding multimodality. While most of them reported extensive use of
multimodality in their instruction, observations showed that in the majority of
their lessons, only one or two modes were used.