Multimodal But Not Yet Multiliterate: A Retrospective Needs Analysis of Pandemic-Era EFL Reading and Writing in the UAE

The abrupt COVID-19 school closures forced English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers to adopt multimodal and online reading and writing practices at speed, but it remains unclear whether this constituted a durable, principled shift toward multiliteracies pedagogy or a temporary, improvised response to crisis. This study addresses that question through a retrospective, explanatory sequential mixed-methods needs analysis conducted in the Al-Dhafra region of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, where strong digital infrastructure meant that access was not the binding constraint on adaptation. A survey of 33 secondary EFL teachers measured six constructs — value, confidence, practice, challenges and remedies, implications, and preferences — and semi-structured interviews with 11 purposively selected teachers explained the survey patterns. Teachers reported high value for, confidence in, and practice of multimodal approaches to teaching EFL reading and writing (all amid-pandemic construct means above 4.0 on a five-point scale), with strong, significant intercorrelations among constructs; the strongest association linked engagement with implementation challenges to recognition of long-term significance (r = .837). A counterintuitive “experience–innovation paradox” emerged: less experienced teachers reported significantly more multimodal practice than their more experienced colleagues (p = .013). Qualitatively, teachers described a trajectory from scepticism to recognition and from uncertainty to self-efficacy, and reframed implementation challenges as informal professional development; yet their adaptation was, by their own account, necessity-induced and atheoretical, lacking explicit multiliteracies grounding. The study contributes a documented, rather than assumed, evidence base for a subsequent multiliteracies intervention, and argues that crisis-era instructional adaptations left teachers multimodally active but in need of a structured framework and institutional support to sustain and deepen the change.

Multiliteracies; EFL reading and writing; teacher change

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