Early millennials have seen the pivotal changes that technology had done in our lives which greatly affect the way we teach, learn, and communicate. From using printed books to do research in the school library and not having a mobile phone, early millennials have migrated to the digital world by embracing the new media through Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. I have gone through these changes myself, and as an English instructor in the Philippines, I have seen, too, how the changes have made tremendous effects on the ways I teach and the ways my students learn. 

Several times, I have struggled to make instructional materials that can simplify linguistic metalanguage, capture my students' attention, and eventually make them learn. I have always believed that books from libraries are the hallmarks of authority in teaching and learning, and refused for a long time to use videos, movies, advertisements, and podcast in my English class. 

But multimodal texts abound in my students' world, a world I refused to enter and understand. Advertisements that may contain consumerist ideologies, magazine covers that may mock feminism, music videos that may contain sexual innuendos are common in social media. They can be accessed by young people who become my students, who eventually become text producers. 

I can remember with fondness how my students taught me how to edit my videos, how to make my Google classroom more engaging, and right now, having this pandemic, how to navigate a Zoom meeting. It was a humbling but enriching experience. It has made me realize how, as a teacher, I can at the same time be my learners' learner. The demands for teachers and students to be multiliterate are recognized by educators and researchers like Mills (2009) and Boche (2014). 

Multimodal analysis is very important not only for teachers and learners but for everyone who are text consumers and text producers. As multimodal texts use a variety and a cross-over of modes, we can all be misled by the aesthetic (the colors, the design, the lay-out), the excitement of sounds and animations, and the newness of it all. Later, we realize, we have bought products we do not actually need, changed our perspectives on things without us knowing it, voted on someone without us knowing what the candidate's plans are. By doing multimodal analysis, we become aware of the tools used by text producers, understand the layers of meanings and motives that come with texts, and give ourselves the right to choose. By become multimodal text analysts, we can choose what to believe in and what to discard. This way, we can have more informed decisions as we consume and create more texts. 

REFERENCES

Boche, B. (2014). Multiliteracies in the Classroom: Emerging conceptions of first year teachers. Retrieved November 9, 2020 from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1030724.pdf

Mills, K.A. (2009). Multiliteracies: Interrogating Competing Discourses. Language and Education, 23 (2) 103-116. DOI: 10.1080/09500780802152762