This article presents the results of implementing a musical/multimodal/multilingual pedagogical
approach to foster literacy practices in an ESL composition classroom at the University of Puerto
Rico-Mayagüez Campus. Based on the students’ written reflections, multimodal texts, and
subsequent interviews, this qualitative research study highlights the sociocultural affordances of
engaging students in multimodal interpretation of music and music videos, as well as
encouraging student production of multimodal texts, while shuttling between languages.
Following A. Suresh Canagarajah (2001), if we adopt a negotiation model with multilingual
writers, “rather than treating writers as passive, conditioned by their language and culture, we
would treat them as agentive, shuttling creatively between discourses to achieve their
communicative objectives” (161). This study also joins others who have explored sound’s
potential in composing multimodal products (McKee, 2006; Shipka, 2006) but follows a broader
conception of multimodal literacy (Jewitt & Kress, 2003) and multimodal discourse (Kress &
Van Leeuwen, 2004). Coupling a multimodal teaching approach with multilingual considerations
provides students with a space for careful reflection of sociocultural issues within a transnational
academic writing setting.