Author(s): Bhavarita Subramaniam, Azlina Abdul Aziz, Mohd Effendi @ Ewan Bin Mohd Matore
The significant role of multimodal reading in education is ostensive and inevitable in this digital era. The fast ranging digital literacy has urged many countries to turn conventional reading to multimodal reading. Many experimental studies have substantiated on the powerful attributes of multimodal reading to enhance better reading ability. Despite this, multimodal role in the field of reading assessment remains ambivalent. Only a handful of systematic literature review (SLR) studies have looked into multimodal reading assessment for English as Second Language (ESL) studies. Having that mentioned, this study had systematically analysed the literature pertaining to Multimodal Reading Assessment practices in ESL classroom. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) review method had guided this study. The reviewed papers were published between 1970 and 2019. An SLR of Web of Science (WoS) and SCOPUS databases resulted in 28 studies. After reviewing the related key words and abstracts for inclusion and exclusion criteria, only 28 papers were related to multimodal reading assessment and had been selected for review. Upon further review, 33 main themes and 149 sub-themes related to multimodal reading assessment were identified from the articles. The findings suggest vast opportunities for future researchers to develop a comprehensive multimodal reading assessment rubric that is globally compatible for various purposes. The emergence of the listed new themes contributes to the field of language studies.