Creating Multimodal Compositions: Young Belizeans Dialogue Across Cultures

2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-246
Author(s):  
Marva Cappello
2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joohoon Kang

Purpose This paper aims to investigate adolescent English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ digitally mediated multimodal compositions across different genres of writing. Design/methodology/approach Three Korean high school students participated in the study and created multiple multimodal texts over the course of one academic semester. These texts and other materials were the basis for this study’s qualitative case studies. Multiple sources of data (e.g. class observations, demographic surveys, interviews, field notes and students’ artifacts) were collected. Drawing upon the inductive approach, a coding-oriented analysis was used for the collected data. In addition, a multimodal text analysis was conducted for the students’ multimodal texts and their storyboards. Findings The study participants’ perceptions of multimodal composing practices seemed to be positively reshaped as a result of them creating multimodal texts. Some participants created multimodal products in phases (e.g. selecting or changing a topic, constructing a storyboard and editing). Especially, although the students’ creative processes had a similarly fixed and linear flow from print-based writing to other modalities, their creative processes proved to be flexible, recursive and/or circular. Originality/value This study contributes to the understanding of adolescent English language learners’ multimodal composing practices in the EFL context, which has been underexplored in the literature. It also presents the students’ perspectives on these practices. In short, it provides theoretical and methodological grounds for future L2 literacy researchers to conduct empirical studies on multimodal composing practices.


Author(s):  
Patricia Martínez-Álvarez ◽  
María Paula Ghiso

This chapter describes a series of integrated curricular invitations that sought to unsettle hierarchies of power by creating hybrid spaces that leverage students' cultural and linguistic resources in the form of multilingual community-based knowledge. The project involved participation from a total of 138 bilingual first graders in two dual language public elementary schools and was implemented, investigated, and revised over a two-year period. The curricular invitations were informed by a conceptual framework that brought together Nieto's (2009) elements of culture with theories of Expansive Learning. This dual framework assists us in articulating the theoretical underpinnings of each step of the proposed sequence. Teaching implications and future research directions are presented.


Author(s):  
Jill Castek ◽  
Heather Cotanch

This study explores patterns emerging from 7th grade students’ digital multimodal compositions created in response to a service-learning project focused on safe driving. Through a descriptive content analysis of three case-study groups’ digital products, this chapter presents educators with tangible ideas of what the digital composition process can yield when students are offered multimodal tools for self-expression. Three themes, collaboration, experimentation, and choice, describe the classroom contexts that are supportive of students’ creation of digital screencasts. Findings suggest that collaboration engages students in a participatory culture that invites those students who may be less proficient with alphabetic writing but who have unique perspectives to share and rich ideas to communicate. This study stands as a useful starting point for guiding teachers toward ways to incorporate an expanded set of writing practices, including digital multimodal composition, that engage all students in finding their voice.


2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 454-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernest Morrell

Can growing inequities between rich and poor and massive manifestations of hatred and intolerance amid rising tides of global populism inspire a focus on equity and diversity in literacy research, policy, and practice? Can such calls for change be collaborative rather than competitive? Can we envision self-love, wellness, and intercultural understanding as compelling ends of a reimagined literacy pedagogy? Toward these ends, this essay offers demographic, moral, and economic imperatives for fundamentally reconsidering literacy policy and practice. It then presents five “big” ideas. We must ask different questions, we must identify and problematize our notions of success, we must advocate for the equitable distribution of material resources, we must fight for bottom-up accountability practices, and we must envision new literacy practices that reflect our new global reality. Finally it advocates a global postcolonial critical literacies framework where teachers are positioned as intellectuals and agents of change, where students have opportunities to collaboratively produce and distribute multimodal compositions, where children have access to a wider array of literary texts that enable them to become powerful, reflexive readers of the word and the world, and where parents and communities are partners in the project of nurturing powerful readers, authors, and speaker.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 312-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate T. Anderson ◽  
Dani Kachorsky

Purpose This article presents an analysis of empirical literature on classroom assessment of students’ multimodal compositions to characterize the field and make recommendations for teachers and researchers. Design/methodology/approach An interpretive synthesis of the literature related to practices and possibilities for assessing students’ multimodal compositions. Findings Findings present three overarching types of studies across the body of literature on assessment of student multimodal compositions: reshaping educational practices, promoting multiliteracies approaches to learning and evaluating students’ understanding and competence. These studies’ recommendations range along a continuum of more to less structural changes to “what counts” in classrooms. Research limitations/implications This review only considers studies published in English from 2000to 2019. Future studies could extend these parameters. Practical implications This analysis of the literature on assessing student multimodal compositions highlights foundational differences across studies’ purposes and offers guidance for educations seeking to revise their practices, whether their goals are more theoretical/philosophical, oriented toward reshaping classroom practice or focused on ways of measuring student understanding. Social implications Rethinking assessment can reshape educational practices to be more equitable, more theoretically commensurate with teachers’ beliefs and/or include more thorough and accurate measures of student understanding. Changes to any or all of these facets of educational practices can lead to continued discussion and change regarding the role of multimodal composition in teaching and learning. Originality/value This study fills a gap in the literature by considering what empirical studies suggest about why, how and what to assess with regard to multimodal compositions.


Author(s):  
Anders Bonde

In this article I will demonstrate an analytic-hermeneutic approach regarding multimodal semiosis in audio-visual media products, such as television commercials and documentaries in which several modalities or semiotic resources co-operate and interact. As a theoretical framework I will exploit the concept of emergence. Although usually associated with philosophy, systems theory and the sciences, this concept can prove instructive in evaluating intermodal correlation in perceptive-aesthetic phenomena as well, seeing that multimodal semiosis is not merely a summation of images plus words plus music. Taking as a point of departure the expressive and semantic potential of music as one component in a coherent multimodal whole, I will discuss a number of profound contributions to the field of music’s semiotic potential in multimedia in relation to a comprehensive analytical framework, which take into consideration the established criteria for emergence. I shall illustrate my approach by analysing a television commercial for “SkandiaBanken”, named Killarna (“The Guys”), and two scenes from a Danish documentary, Fogh bag facaden (“Fogh behind the façade”). All three audio-visual clips include the same musical composition (“Waltz No. 2” by Dmitri Shostakovich), but compared to each other, the music takes on different roles and positions against the other modalities/resources, and consequently, different types of meaning emergence are shaped.


2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 617-644 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus A. Höllerer ◽  
Dennis Jancsary ◽  
Maria Grafström

Through its specific rhetorical potential that is distinct from verbal text, visual material facilitates and plays a pivotal role in linking novel phenomena to established and taken-for-granted social categories and discourses within the social stock of knowledge. Employing data from the worldwide news coverage of the global financial crisis in the Financial Times between 2008 and 2012, we analyse sensemaking and sensegiving efforts in the business media. We identify a set of specific multimodal compositions that construct and shape a limited number of narratives on the global financial crisis through distinct relationships between visual and verbal text. By outlining how multimodal compositions enhance representation, theorization, resonance, and perceived validity of narratives, we contribute to the phenomenological tradition in institutional organization theory and to research on multimodal meaning construction. We argue that elaborate multimodal compositions of verbal text, images, and other visual artifacts constitute a key resource for sensemaking and, consequently, sensegiving.


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