Perceptions of multimodal literacy in engineering university students

This research article has as objective, to determine the perception of engineering students about multimodal reading and writing (multimodal literacy). The study has as theoretical and empirical references Fedorenko (2019), Gladic-Miralles and Cautin-Epifani (2018), Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001), O'Halloran (2012), Parodi (2017, 2020), among others. The mixed method was used, that is, the ex post facto design of the descriptive-correlational type, applying a Likert-type questionnaire to 415 students of the engineering area of both sexes and in parallel, two groups were carried out. The results show that the university students did not access formal-institutional multimodal literacy, but they have informal multimodal literacy, that is, they learned from personal practice with the interaction of multimodality in social networks, on the streets, in shopping centers and in University. However, informal multimodal literacy is insufficient to undertake the task of comprehension and production of multimodal texts since students show difficulties in producing or understanding multimodal discourses of a university or academic nature. These university students require multimodal literacy to produce and understand multisemiotic texts in their specialties. There is no doubt, then, that the knowledge acquired in informal multimodal literacy is not transferable to academic or scientific discourses. The importance that the university includes in its curricular structure, multimodality subjects, to guarantee equity in academic, scientific and professional teaching-learning is discussed.