Citizen journalism as a form of multimodal composing: understanding students’ self-reported affordances, constraints, and follow-up learning goals

The current study invited a group of adolescent Taiwanese learners to take the role of citizen journalists and make news reports on issues of their interests. Student perceptions of the affordances and constraints of this multimodal writing assignment were gauged through an open-ended questionnaire which students filled out at the end of the semester. It was found that the top three affordances perceived by students were film-making techniques, Chinese-to-English translation skills, and organizing information to make a video. The project also provided them with novel experiences such as interviewing someone. However, because of the varying levels of student commitment to group projects and how different tasks were delegated, some students felt that their exploration was not in-depth enough, and their learning was limited to the tasks they were responsible for. Students also set their future learning goals after they completed their videos. This article concludes with recommendations for future research and pedagogy.