Eco-multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of Novo Amor's Birthplace and the Reception of College Students: A Basis for Environmental Literacy Development

Abstract

Environmental campaigns increasingly depend on multimodal design to make ecological crises visible, felt, and discussable, yet their pedagogical effects do not always match the persuasive force of such texts. This study examined Novo Amor's Birthplace as an eco-multimodal campaign text and asked how its visual, compositional, and ecolinguistic resources construct meanings of marine pollution, and how multilingual Filipino undergraduates interpret those resources. Using a qualitative sequential explanatory design, the study first conducted an eco-multimodal critical discourse analysis of the video. Then it analyzed 84 written reflections from undergraduate students using reflexive thematic analysis. The results show that the video stages a clear reversal of agency: the human figure initially appears as an intruding colonizer of the ocean floor, but gradually becomes passive, enclosed, and vulnerable. Its interactional choices narrow distance and intensify emotional pressure, while compositional arrangements assign salience to waste, darkness, and the large-scale plastic whale. From an ecolinguistic perspective, the campaign works through metaphor, discursive erasure, and a powerful reallocation of agency that frames pollution as a living ecological threat. Student receptions largely aligned with the textual analysis, especially in reading arrogance, irony, and ecological reversal, but several respondents also resisted the ending because it seemed to imply that nature heals only through human disappearance. The study concludes that Birthplace is rhetorically strong but pedagogically double-edged: it can deepen ecological awareness, yet it also risks eco-fatalism if left unframed. The paper argues for classroom use that combines close multimodal reading with localized sustainability action, especially in relation to SDGs 4, 12, and 14.