Abstract : Multimodality in academic settings is a growing field of research, especially when referring to university lectures delivered in English in the Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education (ICLHE) programs. In this chapter, we contribute to this field by holistically studying a content sequence fragment of a practice session in a business degree program taught by a teacher, recognized for her pedagogical effectiveness, and by analyzing the modal ensembles that appear in her teaching. Our aim is to analyze how the different modes that appear in a lecture interweave and perform different functions, all supporting each other. To do so, we explore how the teacher/actor combines verbal and non-verbal multimodal resources with the three levels of actions (higher-level, lower-level, and frozen actions) that appear in the content sequence analyzed. The level of the actor’s attention is studied by means of the foreground-background continuum of attention/awareness to demonstrate the modal intensity of a specific action. The results indicate how different modes are used simultaneously, how certain higher-level actions gain and lose relevance in the development of the lecture, and how frozen actions and spontaneously occurring actions can be complementary. Our findings have important implications for raising the awareness of the teaching staff and faculty lecturing in English in ICLHE programs and for further developing their teaching strategies.
