Multimodality in the Classroom 

At PBS, Indonesian teaching professionals engage in ongoing professional development both in teaching and language skills. They become expert in ‘code-switching’ techniques. Multimodality is concerned with several possible modes or manners in which a person learns or in which a teacher addresses the learners. In each learning situation deeper understanding is achieved through the use of different modes of perception, participation and representation, which support each other. Verbal communication in a PBS classroom means gradual interplay of two languages: the learners mother tongue, and an additional language, where ‘code-switching’ is a natural phenomena in the early stages of L2 development. Non-verbal input makes the verbal message more precise thus increasing comprehension of shared information. Learners construct one universal and abstract representational system when verbal, nonverbal, and symbolic concepts converge in both languages.