Multimodal Literacy

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.

Reading the Visual is an essential introduction that focuses on what teachers should know about multimodal literacy and how to teach it. This engaging book provides theoretical, curricular, and pedagogical frameworks for teaching a wide-range of visual and multimodal texts, including historical fiction, picture books, advertisements, websites, comics, graphic novels, news reports, and film. Each unit of study presented contains suggestions for selecting cornerstone texts and visual images and launching the unit, as well as lesson plans, text sets, and analysis guides. These units are designed to be readily adapted to fit the needs of a variety of settings and grade levels.

A student’s avatar navigates a virtual world and communicates the desires, emotions, and fears of its creator. Yet, how can her writing instructor interpret this form of meaningmaking? Today, multiple modes of communication and information technology are challenging pedagogies in composition and across the disciplines. Writing instructors grapple with incorporating new forms into their curriculums and relating them to established literary practices. Administrators confront the application of new technologies to the restructuring of courses and the classroom itself. Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres examines the possibilities, challenges, and realities of mutimodal composition as an effective means of communication. The chapters view the ways that writing instructors and their students are exploring the spaces where communication occurs, while also asking “what else is possible.” The genres of film, audio, photography, graphics, speeches, storyboards, PowerPoint presentations, virtual environments, written works, and others are investigated to discern both their capabilities and limitations. The contributors highlight the responsibility of instructors to guide students in the consideration of their audience and ethical responsibility, while also maintaining the ability to “speak well.” Additionally, they focus on the need for programmatic changes and a shift in institutional philosophy to close a possible “digital divide” and remain relevant in digital and global economies. Embracing and advancing multimodal communication is essential to both higher education and students. The contributors therefore call for the examination of how writing programs, faculty, and administrators are responding to change, and how the many purposes writing serves can effectively converge within composition curricula.

The authors of this book have provided a very practical and accessible introduction to pedagogic practices that integrate AR into students' literacy and literary experience. This will be a most helpful handbook for teachers seeking to ensure that they are preparing students for the literacies of the 21st century.

"This book establishes a new theoretical and practical framework for multimodal disciplinary literacy (MDL) fused with the subject-specific science pedagogies of senior high school biology, chemistry and physics. It builds a compatible alignment of multiple representation and representation construction approaches to science pedagogy with the social semiotic, systemic functional linguistic based approaches to explicit teaching of disciplinary literacy. The early part of the book explicates the transdisciplinary negotiated theoretical underpinning of the MDL framework, followed by the research-informed repertoire of learning experiences that are then articulated into a comprehensive framework of options for the planning of classroom work. Practical adoption and adaptation of the framework in biology, chemistry and physics classrooms are detailed in separate chapters. The latter chapters indicate the impact of the collaborative research on teachers professional learning and students' multimodal disciplinary literacy engagement, concluding with proposals for accommodating emerging developments in MDL in an ever-changing digital communication world. The MDL framework is designed to enable teachers to develop all students 'disciplinary literacy competencies. This book will be of interest to researchers, teacher educators and postgraduate students in the field of science education. It will also have appeal to those in literacy education and social semiotics"--

This collection critically considers the question of how learning and teaching should be conceived, understood, and approached in light of the changing nature of learning scenarios and new pedagogies in this current age of multimodal digital texts, practices, and communities. The book takes the concept of digital artifacts as being composed of multiple meaning-making semiotic resources, such as visuals, music, and design, as its point of departure to explore how diverse communities interact with these tools and develop and explore their understanding of digital practices in learning contexts. The first section of the volume examines different case studies in which involved participants learn to grapple with the introduction of digital tools for learning in children’s early years of schooling. The second section extends the focus to secondary and higher education settings as digital learning tools grow more complex as do students, parents, and teachers’ interactions with them and the subsequent need for new pedagogies to rethink these multimodal artifacts. A final section reflects on the implications of new multimodal tools, technologies, and pedagogies for teachers, such as on teacher training and community building among educators. In its in-depth look at multimodal approaches to learning as meaning-making in a digital world, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in multimodality, English language teaching, digital communication, and education.

Includes CD-Rom Why are visual approaches to literacy important? Children′s experience of texts is no longer limited to words on printed pages - their reading and writing worlds are formed in multimodal ways, combining different modes of communication, including speech or sound, still or moving images, writing and gesture. This book is a practical guide for teachers in making sense of multimodal approaches to teaching writing. The book covers topics such as: - The design of multimodal texts and the relationships between texts and images - How to build a supportive classroom environment for analysing visual and audiovisual texts, and how to teach about reading images - How to plan a teaching sequence leading to specific writing outcomes - Examples of teaching sequences for developing work on narrative, non-fiction and poetry - Formative and summative assessment of multimodal texts, providing levels for judging pupil development, and suggestions for moving pupils forward - How to write, review and carry out a whole school policy for teaching multimodal writing The book is accompanied by a CD, which contains a range of examples of children′s multimodal work, along with electronic versions of the activities and photocopiable sheets from the book, and material designed for use with interactive whiteboards. It will be a valuable resource for primary teachers, literacy co-ordinators and students on initial teacher training courses.

Beginning with theory, focusing on insider stories about modes, how they work, and how to work with them, then concluding with the implications and application of such information, this text brings the multiple modes together into an integrated theory of multimodality.