Literacy And Multimodality Across Global Sites

Over the past three decades, our conceptualizations of literacy and what it means to be literate have expanded to include recognition that there is a qualitative difference in how we communicate through modalities such as the visual, audio, spatial, and linguistic and that different modes are combined in complex ways to make meaning. The field of multimodality is concerned with how human beings use different modes of communication to represent or make meaning in the world. Despite the rapid growth of international research in this area, accounts of a broader range of global sites, particularly economically under-resourced and culturally diverse contexts such as Sub-Saharan Africa, remain under-researched and under-represented in the literature. This book contextualizes a range of literacies including health literacies, community literacies, family literacies, and multilingual literacies within broader modes of communication, most specifically play and the visual. The claim is that powerful pedagogies, methodologies and theories can be constructed by taking a more detailed look at multimodal meaning-making in diverse contexts. By describing and analyzing multimodal practices and texts across a diverse range of contexts, the book highlights different constructs, issues and emerging questions dealing with the study of literacies and multimodality.

Over the past three decades, our conceptualizations of literacy and what it means to be literate have expanded to include recognition that there is a qualitative difference in how we communicate through modalities such as the visual, audio, spatial, and linguistic and that different modes are combined in complex ways to make meaning. The field of multimodality is concerned with how human beings use different modes of communication to represent or make meaning in the world. Despite the rapid growth of international research in this area, accounts of a broader range of global sites, particularly economically under-resourced and culturally diverse contexts such as Sub-Saharan Africa, remain under-researched and under-represented in the literature. This book contextualizes a range of literacies including health literacies, community literacies, family literacies, and multilingual literacies within broader modes of communication, most specifically play and the visual. The claim is that powerful pedagogies, methodologies and theories can be constructed by taking a more detailed look at multimodal meaning-making in diverse contexts. By describing and analyzing multimodal practices and texts across a diverse range of contexts, the book highlights different constructs, issues and emerging questions dealing with the study of literacies and multimodality.

Shortlisted for the 2020 BAAL Book Prize This book brings together empirical studies from around the world to help readers gain a better understanding of multilinguals, ranging from small children to elderly people, and their lives. The chapters focus on the multilingual subjects’ identities and the ways in which they are discursively and/or visually constructed, and are split into sections looking specifically at the multilingual self, the multilingual learner and multilingual teacher education. The studies draw on rich visual data, which is analysed for content and/or form and often complemented with other types of data, to investigate how multilinguals make sense of their use and knowledge of more than one language in their specific context. The topic of multilingualism is addressed as subjectively experienced and the book unites the current multilingual, narrative and visual turns in Applied Language Studies. It will be of interest to students and researchers working in the areas of language learning and teaching, teacher education and bi/multilingualism, as well as to those interested in using visual methods and narratives as a means of academic research.

The Routledge Companion to Interdisciplinary Studies in Singing, Volume II: Education examines the many methods and motivations for vocal pedagogy, promoting singing not just as an art form arising from the musical instrument found within every individual but also as a means of communication with social, psychological, and didactic functions. Presenting research from myriad fields of study beyond music—including psychology, education, sociology, computer science, linguistics, physiology, and neuroscience—the contributors address singing in three parts: Learning to Sing Naturally Formal Teaching of Singing Using Singing to Teach In 2009, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded a seven-year major collaborative research initiative known as Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in Singing (AIRS). Together, global researchers from a broad range of disciplines addressed three challenging questions: How does singing develop in every human being? How should singing be taught and used to teach? How does singing impact wellbeing? Across three volumes, The Routledge Companion to Interdisciplinary Studies in Singing consolidates the findings of each of these three questions, defining the current state of theory and research in the field. Volume II: Education focuses on the second question and offers an invaluable resource for anyone who identifies as a singer, wishes to become a singer, works with singers, or is interested in the application of singing for the purposes of education.

This text critically examines changes in Ghanaian language and literacy policy following independence in 1957 to consider its impacts on early literacy teaching. By adopting a postcolonial theoretical perspective, the text interrogates the logic behind policy changes which have prioritised English, local language, or biliteracy. It draws on data from interviews with teachers and researcher observation to demonstrate how policies have influenced teaching and learning. Dr Osseo-Asare’s findings inform the development of a conceptual framework which highlights the socio-cultural factors that impact the literacy and biliteracy of young children in Ghana, offering solutions to help teachers combat the challenges of frequent policy changes. This timely monograph will prove to be an essential resource not only for researchers working on education policies, teacher education, and English-language learning in postcolonial Ghana but also for those looking to identify the thematic and methodological nuances of studying literacy and education in postcolonial contexts.

Approaching academic assignments as practical controversies, this book offers a novel approach to the study of digital literacy. Through in-depth accounts of assignment writing in college classrooms, Bhatt examines ways of understanding how students engage with digital media in curricular activities and how these give rise to new practices of information management and knowledge creation. He further considers what these new practices portend for a stronger theory of digital literacy in an age of informational abundance and ubiquitous connectivity. Looking also at how institutional digital learning policies and strategies are applied in classrooms, and how students may embrace or avoid imposed technologies, this book offers an in-depth study of learner practices. It is through the comprehensive study of such practices that we can better understand the efficacy of technological investments in education, and the dynamic nature of digital literacy on the part of students charged with using those technologies.

Taking a close look at multimodal composing as an essential new literacy in schools, this volume draws from contextualized case studies across educational contexts to provide detailed portraits of teachers and students at work in classrooms. Authors elaborate key issues in transforming classrooms with student multimodal composing, including changes in teachers, teaching, and learning. Six action principles for teaching for embodied learning through multimodal composing are presented and explained. The rich illustrations of practice encourage both discussion of practical challenges and dilemmas and conceptualization beyond the specific cases. Historically, issues in New Literacy Studies, multimodality, new literacies, and multiliteracies have primarily been addressed theoretically, promoting a shift in educators’ thinking about what constitutes literacy teaching and learning in a world no longer bounded by print text only. Such theory is necessary (and beneficial for re-thinking practices). What Multimodal Composing in Classrooms contributes to this scholarship are the voices of teachers and students talking about changing practices in real classrooms.

Multimodal Literacy challenges dominant ideas around language, learning, and representation. Using a rich variety of examples, it shows the range of representational and communicational modes involved in learning through image, animated movement, writing, speech, gesture, or gaze. The effect of these modes on learning is explored in different sites including formal learning across the curriculum in primary, secondary, and higher education classrooms, as well as learning in the home. The notion of literacy and learning as a primary linguistic accomplishment is questioned in favor of the multimodal character of learning and literacy. By illustrating how a range of modes contributes to the shaping of knowledge and what it means to be a learner, Multimodal Literacy provides a multimodal framework and conceptual tools for a fundamental rethinking of literacy and learning.