First Steps towards Multimodal Functional Concordancing

The development of the MCA (Multimodal Corpus Authoring System, Baldry 2005, Baldry/Beltrami 2005) online corpus construction and concordancing system, ca­pable of investigating a variety of multimodal texts without denuding them of their distinguishing features, has led to extensive research on the integration of multimodal corpora, and multimodal concordancing in particular, into university syllabuses in the past few years (Baldry et al. 2005, Grunther 2005, Ackerley/Coccetta 2007b, Baldry 2007, in press, Grunther 2007, Coccetta in press, Dalziel/Metelli in press). This article describes a pilot project set up at the University of Padua (Coccetta 2004) which through the use of the MCA system made a small corpus of film texts, the English Language Learning Oriented (ELLO) film corpus, more easily accessible to language learners and allowed them to investigate: a) how a specific language function (van Ek/Trim 1998a, 1998b, 2001) is enacted by a set of different language forms and b) the ways in which the various manifestations of this function perform in relation to the multimodal co-text in which they are produced. In so doing, it illustrates some of the benefits this approach brings to language learning and gives examples of teaching materials based on the ELLO film corpus which are designed to promote language learners’ communicative competence.