Cognitive Load, Multimodal Composing and Writing Center Support for Multilingual Writers (Download PDF)
Lynn Reid, Fairleigh Dickinson University
Although first-year composition has historically been viewed as a “service course” that carries the institutional expectation of preparing students for the academic writing they will do throughout their college careers, there has been increased emphasis on multimodal and multilingual paradigms that reinvision the work of composition in exciting ways. Though these approaches hold a great deal of promise, I argue that adopting them in the absence of a developed infrastructure of support can actually do more to disadvantage multilingual students than support them. I outline a failed Prezi assignment from a FYC course that I taught to highlight the potential pitfalls of going multimodal with a relatively large multilingual population, a failure that I attribute to a failure to recognize the cognitive demands of the task and limited institutional support services for students that they may have otherwise relied on to complete an assignment.
