Award Winners for Volume 31
Digital Multimodal Composing in Beginning L2 Spanish Classes: Student-Created Children’s Books
This work explores the incorporation of children’s books into university second language (L2) Spanish instruction for the development of students’ critical multimodal literacies and meaning making. Twenty-three learners’ collaborative analysis of authentic children’s stories in the target language and the production of their own were grounded in the multiliteracies framework Learning by Design. Instruction also included the responsible use of generative AI technologies. The article first describes the pedagogical intervention that guided students’ work in a beginning Spanish class in the United States. This is followed by the holistic examination of the student-created multimodal stories, with a focus on learners’ digital multimodal composing competence. Findings show that students were able to produce creative artifacts that were thematically and linguistically appropriate for a children’s audience. Some stories also reflected socially relevant issues and aspects of students’ lifeworlds. Nevertheless, all products also point to learners’ difficulty with the choice, organization, and integration of different modes of communication and their limited understanding of their intended audience’s needs, which affected the effectiveness of the messages conveyed. Based on these results, we offer suggestions to address possible shortcomings in the adoption of digital multimodal composing in beginning L2 classes.
The article Digital Multimodal Composing in Beginning L2 Spanish Classes: Student-Created Children’s Books, documents an ambitious pedagogical project developed in a second-semester Spanish course at a liberal arts college. This is a required class that fulfills the language component of the core curriculum. Many students arrive directly from high school, often with limited exposure to multicultural perspectives. They typically have low confidence in their Spanish abilities and view language learning as primarily an academic task.
The project invited students to create original multimodal children’s books in Spanish, designed for potential use in institutional educational outreach programs in rural areas of Latin America or for local sharing in community libraries. Grounded in the multiliteracies framework Learning by Design, the course challenged students to move beyond traditional grammar drills and vocabulary lists, engaging instead with language as a tool for storytelling, representation, and social connection. Students explored authentic children's books in Spanish, analyzing their narrative and visual structures. They also utilized digital tools, including generative AI, to illustrate their own books.
Despite their novice proficiency, the students created thoughtful, age-appropriate stories. These stories reflected not only linguistic development but also creativity, empathy, and audience awareness. The process allowed them to see themselves as contributors to something meaningful beyond the classroom.
Significantly, the article fosters invaluable instructional reflection. Recognizing the need for more intentional scaffolding in non-verbal meaning-making, specifically in areas like visual and spatial design. This insight will inform the design of future projects and contribute to creating more effective learning experiences. Beyond its impact on the design of similar projects, this work contributes to evolving pedagogical practices in language instruction. It offers a model for how even beginning-level courses can incorporate critical thinking, creative expression, and socially relevant engagement through digital and multimodal composing. I hope it inspires other educators to reimagine what is possible in their own classrooms—especially when working with novice learners.
Ultimately, this project reflects my central commitment to designing intellectually rigorous, socially engaged, and creatively empowering educational experiences, and I am excited to continue developing these types of opportunities for students to connect, imagine, and contribute to a global and diverse world.
—Maybel Mesa Morales
I believe this article offers a timely contribution to the field of second language (L2) education by advancing our understanding of digital multimodal composing (DMC) in beginner-level L2 Spanish instruction—a context that remains largely underexplored. By positioning student-created children’s books within the Learning by Design multiliteracies framework, this study not only demonstrates how DMC can support linguistic development, but also how it can foster creativity, motivation, and engagement among L2 learners when work is organized within the pedagogy’s knowledge processes.
Also, a notable contribution of this work might lie in its integration of socially relevant pedagogical goals with service learning, as students’ final digital storybooks were created for real-world use by young readers in the Dominican Republic. This situated, purpose-driven instructional focus reinforces the importance of authenticity and audience in L2 production beyond traditional classroom boundaries.
Importantly, this study reveals that while the participating learners were capable of producing linguistically appropriate and creatively structured texts, some of them struggled with integrating other meaning forms (e.g., image and space) effectively. These findings underscore the need for deeper scaffolding in the design and production of multimodal texts, especially in beginning L2 classrooms. Moreover, the project emphasized the value of identity expression and personal connection in enhancing both linguistic outcomes and multimodal competence. The most successful projects—those rich in cohesive semiotic integration and cultural relevance—were those where learners drew directly from their own lifeworlds and interests.
This article also pushes the field to reconceptualize beginner L2 learners as active meaning-makers who, when adequately supported, can engage in complex communicative acts through diverse meaning forms. I believe this work might encourage L2 educators and researchers to reconsider the traditional boundaries of writing in language instruction, advocating for DMC as a core component of 21st-century literacies.
In sum, this work offers both practical strategies and theoretical insights that can inform curriculum development, teacher training, and further research in multiliteracies-based L2 pedagogy. I feel it invites the field to embrace DMC not as an add-on, but as an essential practice in fostering communicative competence, learner agency, and culturally responsive teaching in today’s multilingual, digitally-mediated world.
—Gabriela C. Zapata