Motivating rural EFL students in multimodal teaching

English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching with the focus on drills often demotivates Taiwanese students in rural districts. As many studies connected multimodal teaching to motivation, the present study was thus set up to introduce multimodal teaching at a grade five class in a rural elementary school community of indigenous students and to explore its relationship to motivation. Data collected included questionnaires, interviews, teaching videos, student artifacts, and my reflection journal. The study found that multimodal teaching motivated participants to learn English by providing opportunities for participants to use their senses, to draw upon cultural and personal resources and build more equal power relationships. This study suggest that teachers need to use arts, singing, and drama, dance and language to enhance students’ motivation. This study is significant as few studies have explored multimodal teaching and motivation (Jacob, 2012; Jiang & Luk, 2016) and with rural and indigenous students.