Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Multimodal communication now constitutes a significant and important area of inquiry in applied linguistics. Grounded in the recognition that all forms of meaning‐making involve communicative modes in addition to language alone, multimodal analytical frameworks have become increasingly applied across a wide spectrum of thematic empirical domains. Contemporary empirical work has furthered multimodal perspectives, which challenge long‐standing distinctions between linguistic and nonlinguistic phenomena, as scholars increasingly treat gestures, gaze, posture, proxemics, visual design, and digital materialities as integral to the meanings produced in communicative ensembles.</jats:p> <jats:p>This introduction to entries in the Multimodal Communication area of applied linguistics provides a brief historical and theoretical overview and highlights key empirical traditions including social semiotics, systemic functional linguistics, mediated discourse analysis, and interactionally oriented approaches. It also provides a brief overview of the entries in this section, which includes multimodal research across diverse applied linguistic subdomains, from corpus‐based annotation and digital ethnography to multimodal literacy, pedagogy, workplace communication, and identity.</jats:p> <jats:p>Multimodality has reshaped empirical practice and analytic imagination in applied linguistics, offering increasingly refined tools for understanding the coordination, integration, and design of communicative modes in both face‐to‐face and technologically mediated environments.</jats:p>