How Teachers Coordinate Multilingual and Multimodal Resources in Language Classrooms: A Systematic Review

Abstract

This systematic review aims to examine how teachers coordinate multilingual and multimodal resources in language classrooms and how these coordination practices vary across teaching tasks and classroom contexts. The review addresses two research questions: (1) How do teachers coordinate multilingual and multimodal resources in language classrooms? (2) What similarities and differences exist in teachers' resource coordination practices across different teaching tasks and classroom contexts? Literature searches were conducted in Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, and ERIC. Eligible studies must examine authentic language teaching activities in which teachers coordinate resources from at least two languages and one distinct non-linguistic modality, such as gestures, images, diagrams, or other visual resources, within the same teaching activity. The review includes qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods studies, as well as teaching practice reports that provide authentic teaching data and independently extractable evidence of teachers' resource coordination. Evidence will be synthesized primarily through inductive thematic analysis to identify patterns of teacher resource coordination. Studies will be classified into Tier A (detailed evidence of classroom interaction processes) and Tier B (limited but identifiable evidence of resource coordination) according to the level of detail in their interactional evidence, and the two tiers will be synthesized separately. A comparative matrix will then be used to examine similarities and differences in coordination practices across teaching tasks and classroom contexts. Database searches and AI-assisted preliminary screening have been completed. The next stages will involve independent human review, formal data extraction, methodological quality appraisal, and evidence synthesis.