Multimodal genre analysis of Plain Language Summaries of Publications: “The purpose is to help you understand findings from research”

Plain Language Summaries of Publications (PLSPs) are articles with a visually enhanced format that provide an extended summary of a published research article. The purpose of this study was to examine how medical research articles are recontextualized into PLSPs to make recent research findings accessible to non-specialist audiences. Although there has been research on text-only Plain Language Summaries (PLSs), the orchestration of semiotic resources in PLSPs to convey meaning has not been explored. In this study, a multimodal approach to genre analysis was adopted to analyze the move structure of a corpus of 50 medical PLSPs and examine the multimodal realization of these moves. The move analysis reveals a relatively stable rhetorical structure across PLSPs, with moves that prioritize information relevant to the non-specialist reader. The multimodal analysis shows how semiotic resources, including written language, typography, color, and visuals, are orchestrated to facilitate comprehension. Visuals, ranging from diagrams to data displays and micro-visuals, serve a key role in conveying meaning in PLSPs. They are combined with the verbal text in relations of concurrence and complementarity to enhance accessibility and support narrative flow. These findings suggest that EAP instruction must expand beyond traditional academic writing and include training in plain language translation and multimodal literacy.