Exploring the Effects of Genre on Digital Multimodal Composing Performance in Chinese as a Second Language (CSL): A Cross‐Genre Analysis of Linguistic Features and Multimodal Resource Design

Abstract

Although digital multimodal composing (DMC) has been widely implemented across genres in second‐language (L2) instruction, genre‐based differences in learners’ DMC performance remain underexplored. Existing research has primarily focused on linguistic features, with limited attention to genre's influence on multimodal resource design. This study involved nine learners of Chinese as a second language (CSL), who completed narrative, expository, and argumentative DMC tasks. A total of 27 DMC compositions were collected and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively in terms of two dimensions—linguistic features and multimodal resource design—to examine the effect of genre on CSL learners’ DMC performance. The results revealed significant genre‐based differences in fluency, error‐free T‐unit rate, T‐unit syntactic error rate, lexical sophistication (Levels 1 and 3), and syntactic complexity. Genre differences were also observed in multimodal resource use and intermodal relations. Specifically, argumentative DMC involved greater use of images, whereas narrative DMC showed a stronger reliance on photographs. In addition, narrative DMC showed significantly higher concurrence relations than argumentative DMC, whereas argumentative DMC showed higher complementarity relations. These findings offer pedagogical and research implications for the design and implementation of genre‐specific DMC tasks in CSL instruction.