Cybergenres and English as a Medium of Instruction. Multimodal analysis of digital academic genres and their pedagogical implications in Higher Education EMI contexts

The Spanish university system has accepted internationalization as part of its strategic plans. This has allowed the growth and consolidation of teaching in English in most universities in the country. This research field has been the objective of applied linguistics for years, paying attention to the academic genres that are part of university teaching. The applicant research group has added to this context the multimodal discourse perspective, which means a novelty and an advance in research. This multimodal view refers both to the nature of the text and the semiotic resources used for its construction as well as to communication channels used for its dissemination, highlighting digital genres for academic use. Although digital genres have been used in university teaching since their appearance, it seems clear that the outbreak of the pandemic and its consequences in the university (new plans for digital teaching or revisions of teacher training proposals) has resulted into the use of a wider repertoire of digital genres in teaching in general, and in teaching in English in particular.
This project aims to identify and analyse the generic and multimodal nature of those cybergenres that are currently used in the university classroom, specifically, in the teaching in English context. The purpose of this study is to provide answers about how content teachers using English in their classes integrate and use digital and multimodal genres in their teaching. The ultimate objective is to create the taxonomy of cybergenres that reflects the most used genres when teaching in English in order to approach the design of teacher training proposals that efficiently respond to the discursive and pedagogical needs of this specific EMI teaching. To implement this project, the use of digital genres in the university classroom will be contextualized, at the same time that a corpus (oral, written or hybrid) of digital genres used by content teachers lecturing in English in disciplines from different fields (Humanities, Economics, Engineering and Health) will be compiled. Then, the samples of the genres will be labelled and processed in order to be able to analyse them, attaching a brief description of their characteristics, function and degree of digitalisation according to Shepherd and Watters (1998, p. 98). Accordingly, we Will distinguish between extant (traditional genres that can be replicated) or variant (with some variations)) and novel (without reference in traditional genres or with variations due to the context, such as emergent or spontaneous). This analysis will allow us to examine the discourse in digital genres in its context, taking into account the chosen transmission channel, as well as the pedagogical role of genre in the teaching of the subject.
Finally, these results can be transferred to the training of teachers who conduct their classes in English by means of pedagogical recommendations and guidelines for improving their teaching actions.