The college ESL/EFL classroom is in urgent need of a change in the globalized digital age. How do we implement innovative teaching practices relevant to students’ needs today? How can we raise learning motivation while developing abilities in intercultural communication that will help to solve problems in the future? Multiliteracies pedagogy aims to achieve these goals by promoting multimodal literacies and multicultural understanding. This study explores ways to integrate and implement multiliteracies pedagogy in a college ESL/EFL course on Critical Reading and Rhetoric. A special emphasis was placed on creativity, for which an assessment chart comprising items on divergent and convergent/critical thinking was created to check learning outcomes. The course included three units, each containing the four knowledge processes of multiliteracies: experiencing, conceptualizing, analyzing/critiquing, and applying. In lieu of the sole emphasis on lectures in the past, reflective journals, group discussion, and transmediation projects were adopted to add depth to learning. Digital rhetoric was added in an attempt to update traditional rhetoric; innovative multimodal rhetoric-in-practice (RIP) projects included “Everyday (Visual) Text Analysis,” ad comparison, meme generation, Internet celebrity analysis, and self-collage. Learning outcomes showed that visual texts and digital RIP projects helped to enhance learning motivation and creative thinking. Nevertheless, students’ reservations about self-identity issues revealed still-emerging abilities in critical reflection and cognitive flexibility.
