CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND This paper is based on an experiment conducted on four classes of second year English Majors (app. 100 students) at Sorbonne Nouvelle University (Paris, France) in 2021/2022 after the authors realized that they experienced difficulties teaching their students the basic syntax of Noun Phrases in English. Their intuition was that most students failed to learn for at least two reasons: they did not engage as they did not see what there was to learn and what was asked of them (drawing syntactic trees) was out of their reach. They decided to adopt a multimodal approach based on a combination of verbal and non-verbal mediums to support the students’ learning process (Papageorgiou & Lameras, 2017). EXPRERIMENT The authors redesigned the lesson, keeping the lecture on the opposition between linearity and syntax to a minimum. They introduced the notion of syntactic ambiguity as proof that syntax does exist. How else could one account for the fact that a single sentence, such as “I saw a movie with Brad Pitt” could have two separate meanings: “I saw a movie starring Brad Pitt” AND “I went to the movies with Brad Pitt”? They provided a visual representation of the two semantic interpretations and introduced the notion of syntactic bracketing as a simple visual way of making syntax visible. Students were then presented with pair work. Confronted with syntactically ambiguous sentences, they were asked to: - Discuss the two possible interpretations in their own words, i.e. produce a gloss, - Draw the two interpretations, - Add a follow-up sentence to clarify the context, - Bracket the noun phrases to make the syntactic pattern visible At the end of the one-hour session, drawings were kept for further study and students filled in a satisfaction questionnaire. Students were offered additional practice online. The online MCQ activity consisted of showing one’s understanding of the syntactic bracketing of an ambiguous sentence by choosing thecorrect gloss, the correct drawing and the correct follow-up sentence. Results were kept for further analysis. Students were submitted to a similar MCQ during the in-class midterm exam. RESULTS The satisfaction questionnaire was filled in by 93 students. It shows great appreciation for the in-class activity. Ninety-two students stated that they enjoyed the activity. One stated that they didn’t. A vast majority also stated that they felt the activity helped them understand the notion of syntax vs. linearity of language (91 vs. 2). All students stated that they liked being offered more than one way of completing the activity. They described their favorite modality as follows: 40 chose drawing, 26 chose bracketing, 13 chose the follow-up sentence and 10 the gloss. Eighty-eight students stated that they were capable of disambiguating a sentence, using their preferred modality, against 4 who stated they couldn’t. As for the midterm exam, the preliminary results show that a vast majority of students succeeded in showing their understanding of bracketing (53 students out of 59). DISCUSSION The comparison of exam results and confidence rate shows that students were correct in estimating that they could disambiguate a sentence. Although they seem to have strong preferences for one more over another, they equally succeeded in using them. The authors did not anticipate that bracketing would come so high on the preference scale. We hypothesize that students prefer symbolic representation (such as drawing or bracketing) over non symbolic representation (such as the follow-up sentence and the gloss) as students seem to find it difficult to express their intuitions/understanding using language. This does not mean, however, that they master bracketing. The authors will test their capacity to produce (not just understand) bracketing on ambiguous sentences in the end-of-the-semester test. The results will be analyzed in the final version of the article. The authors would like to conclude that the results tend to prove that the original hypothesis (drawing might be an interesting first step to help the students out of their comfort zone) was probably valid. Drawing and offering an array of mediums to describe the syntax of Noun Phrases made the students feel confident and engaged in learning. However, it does not help get the students to the next level as university students will be expected to exhibit understanding in words, and not just in their own words but in academic English. In-class activities should include that phase and help them transition towards verbal expression of their understanding.