Multimodal Literacy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathy A. Mills ◽  
Len Unsworth
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Digital Images ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Mobile Technologies ◽  
Language And Literacy ◽  
Multimodal Literacy ◽  
Multimodal Texts ◽  
Making Meaning

Multimodal literacy is a term that originates in social semiotics, and refers to the study of language that combines two or more modes of meaning. The related term, multimodality, refers to the constitution of multiple modes in semiosis or meaning making. Modes are defined differently across schools of thought, and the classification of modes is somewhat contested. However, from a social semiotic approach, modes are the socially and culturally shaped resources or semiotic structure for making meaning. Specific examples of modes from a social semiotic perspective include speech, gesture, written language, music, mathematical notation, drawings, photographic images, or moving digital images. Language and literacy practices have always been multimodal, because communication requires attending to diverse kinds of meanings, whether of spoken or written words, visual images, gestures, posture, movement, sound, or silence. Yet, undeniably, the affordances of people-driven digital media and textual production have given rise to an exponential increase in the circulation of multimodal texts in networked digital environments. Multimodal text production has become a central part of everyday life for many people throughout the life course, and across cultures and societies. This has been enabled by the ease of producing and sharing digital images, music, video games, apps, and other digital media via the Internet and mobile technologies. The increasing significance of multimodal literacy for communication has led to a growing body of research and theory to address the differing potentials of modes and their intermodality for making meaning. The study of multimodal literacy learning in schools and society is an emergent field of research, which begins with the important recognition that reading and writing are rarely practiced as discrete skills, but are intimately connected to the use of multimodal texts, often in digital contexts of use. The implications of multimodal literacy for pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment in education is an expanding field of multimodal research. In addition, there is a growing attention to multimodal literacy practices that are practiced in informal social contexts, from early childhood to adolescence and adulthood, such as in homes, recreational sites, communities, and workplaces.

scholarly journals Meaning-making in fifth-graders’ multimodal texts

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sofia Jusslin ◽  
Ulrika Magnusson ◽  
Katarina Rejman ◽  
Ria Heilä-Ylikallio ◽  
Siv Björklund
Keyword(s):  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Fifth Grade ◽  
Multimodal Literacy ◽  
Multimodal Texts ◽  
Fifth Grade Students ◽  
Writing Research ◽  
Semiotic Approach ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Research Questions

Despite a growing body of research on multimodal writing, scholars still express a need for formal frameworks for discussing multimodal literacy practices and call for  research on multimodality in education that develops a vocabulary to approach multimodal texts in teaching. This study answers this call by presenting an analysis that adds to the field of  multimodal writing research, and thus furthers the knowledge of different semiotic potentials of modes in student-produced texts. Drawing on a social semiotic approach to multimodality, a total of 299 texts, written by fifth-grade students from three schools in Sweden and Finland, are analyzed. The aim is to explore semiotic modes used in the student-produced written texts. The guiding research questions are: (1) What modes are used in the texts, and (2) what meanings are realized through the different modes in the texts. Results showed that six different modes were used to realize meanings in five categories: create representative meaning; visualize phenomena and assignments; foreground important areas; design the text; and decorate the paper. These categories offer a vocabulary that can describe semiotic potentials of the modes and how they realize different meanings in multimodal texts. Such a vocabulary can aid teachers in cultivating, supporting, and assessing students’ multimodal writings that contain multiple modes. From these results, we suggest that acknowledging the diversity of the modes and their meanings in student texts can help raise the awareness of how students also make meaning in modes beyond writing and image.

Access, Opportunity, and Curriculum Making Through Multimodal Meaning-Making and Technology Integration in Teacher Education

2020 ◽  
pp. 188-213
Author(s):  
Christi U. Edge
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Education ◽  
Technology Integration ◽  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Teacher Educator ◽  
Multimodal Literacy ◽  
Multimodal Texts ◽  
Secondary Reading ◽  
Critical Friends ◽  
Curriculum Making

This chapter describes an investigation into exploring meaning making through multimodal literacy practices and technology integration for teacher education within the context of an online, secondary reading course for K-12 teachers. Through the use of a collaborative conference protocol, discourse with cross-disciplinary critical friends, and visual thinking data analysis strategies, a teacher educator examined existing multimodal literacy practices and then studied course redesign and technology integration. Results include recognizing opportunities for diverse learners to access and use prior knowledge in the construction of new knowledge, reframing the course delivery platform as a multimodal “text,” increasing opportunity for learners to construct and communicate complex understandings through multimodal texts and technology-infused assessments, and learners' curriculum making through transmediation mediated by technology.

Languages and Literacies in Translocation

2012 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 364-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allison Skerrett
Keyword(s):  
Adolescent Girl ◽  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Language And Literacy ◽  
The World ◽  
Multiple Languages

Transnational youth represent an increasing demographic in societies around the world. This circumstance has amplified the need to understand how youths’ language and literacy repertoires are shaped by transnational life. In response, this article presents a case study of a Mexican adolescent girl who immigrated to the United States and continued to participate in life in Mexico. It examines shifts in her multiple language and literacy practices that she attributed to transnational life and the knowledge she acquired from transnational engagements with languages and literacies. Data include interviews of the young woman, observations of her in a variety of social contexts, and literacy artifacts that she produced. Research on transnational youths’ language and literacy practices and theories of multiliteracies and border crossing facilitate analysis. Findings include that language and multiliteracy practices shift in interconnected ways in response to transnational life and engagements with multiple languages and literacies foster transnational understandings. Accordingly, attending to transnational youths’ multilingual as well as multiliterate practices can deepen understandings of how people recruit multiple languages, literacies, and lifeworlds for meaning making. Implications of this work are offered concerning the features of a transnational curriculum that can both draw from and build up the language and literacy reservoirs of transnational youth.

Creating Access, Opportunity, and Ownership Through Cross-Cultural Meaning-Making in Academically Diverse Online Courses

2019 ◽  
pp. 42-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christi U. Edge ◽  
Abby Cameron-Standerford ◽  
Bethney Bergh
Keyword(s):  
Teaching Practices ◽  
Online Teaching ◽  
Teacher Educators ◽  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Online Courses ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Multimodal Literacy ◽  
Multimodal Texts ◽  
Self Study ◽  
Relationship Of

As a group of three teacher educators representing reading, special education, and educational leadership, the authors conducted a self-study of their online teaching practices with the guiding question of “How can we use multimodal literacies to re-see our practices and to empower others to construct and to communicate meaning?” The purpose was to explore the pedagogic potentials of multimodal literacy by acting upon recent findings from their longitudinal, collaborative self-study into how they use and learn through visual literacy. They sought to extend their line of inquiry and to more inclusively empower learners to negotiate and to make meaning through multimodal literacy practices. Findings document how using protocols to critically “read,” discuss, and collaboratively make meaning from their online teaching practices illuminated the relationship of multimodal texts, visuals and literacy practices in fostering access, opportunity, and ownership for learners in online courses.

scholarly journals Understanding multilingual young adults and adolescents' digital literacies in the wilds: Implications for language and literacy classrooms

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yiting Han
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Digital Literacy ◽  
Virtual Communities ◽  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Linguistic Diversity ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Language And Literacy ◽  
Emerging Themes ◽  
Technological Affordances

Changes in digital landscapes have complex effects on the meaning-making that they mediate (Thorne et al., 2015). There is a growing interest in examining the daily digital literacy practices of today’s multilingual young adults and adolescents, who are going to become the generation of future global communicators (Kim, 2016). Addressing current scholarship on multilingual digital literacy, this article examines research on digital literacy practices of multilingual young adults and adolescents beyond the classroom. Drawing upon multimodality and translanguaging perspectives that recognize literacy practices as ideological constructions produced within social contexts and across semiotic resources, the article identifies five emerging themes across the research. These themes are: recognizing cultural and linguistic diversity, exploring and constructing multifaceted identities online, leveraging technological affordances for communicating, gaining social support in virtual communities, and developing global citizenship through online intercultural exchanges. This article concludes with implications to support critical multilingualism and multimodality in language and literacy classrooms. 

scholarly journals Applications of multimodal concordances

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (41) ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Anthony Baldry ◽  
Paul J. Thibault
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Multimodal Literacy ◽  
Multimodal Texts ◽  
Multimodal Discourse ◽  
Language Tests ◽  
Multimodal Corpora ◽  
Multimodal Corpus ◽  
Textual Organization

Multimodal corpus linguistics has so far been a theoretical rather than an applicative discipline. This paper sketches out proposals that attempt to bridge between these two perspectives. It does so with particular reference to the development of the conceptual and software tools required to create and concordance multimodal corpora from the applicative standpoint and as such is designed to underpin the study of texts at universities in foreign-language teaching and testing cycles. One branch of this work relates to multimedia language tests which, as illustrated in Section 2, use concordancing techniques to analyze multimodal texts in relation to students’ understanding of oral and written forms of discourse in English. Another branch is the exploration of multimodal tests concerned with the explicit assessment of students’ knowledge of the principles and/or models of textual organization of multimodal texts. The two types of test are not mutually exclusive. A third branch of research thus relates to the development of hybrid tests which, for example, combine a capacity to analyze multimodal texts with an assessment of students’ language skills, such as fluency in speaking and writing in English or which ascertain the multimodal literacy competencies of students and the differing orientations to meaning-making styles that individuals manifest. The paper considers these different applicative perspectives by describing the different categories of concordance achievable with the MCA online concordancer (Section 2) and by defining their relevance to multimodal discourse analysis (Section 3). It also illustrates the use of meaning-oriented multimodal concordances in the creation and implementation of multimodal tests (Sections 4). It concludes by suggesting that the re-interpretation of the nature and functions of concordances is long overdue and that the exploration of new types of concordance is salutary for linguistics and semiotics in general.

Visual accounts of Finnish and Greek teenagers’ perceptions of their multilingual language and literacy practices

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 333-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Pitkänen-Huhta ◽  
Anastasia Rothoni
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
First Language ◽  
Visual Methods ◽  
Language And Literacy ◽  
Personal Meanings ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Common

AbstractThis paper uses visual methods to explore how teenagers in two different European countries (Finland and Greece) personally relate to their first language and to English, which is widely used in the everyday lives of young people in both countries. Our data comprise sets of self-made visualizations in which 14- to 16-year-old teenagers depict their personal relationship to their first language (Finnish/Greek) and to English. Theoretically and methodologically, we subscribe to socio-culturally oriented research on (foreign language) literacy and language learning and recent studies on multilingualism. Overall, by offering a detailed account of the variety of representation forms and meaning-making symbols employed by our participants in their visual products, our analysis in this paper highlights the common but also diverse perceptions, values and attitudes that young people from two different European contexts bring to their practices and their encounters with English and other languages in their lives. By revealing the personal meanings and values attached by teenagers to English, our analysis also provides indirect insights into the multiple ways English is locally encountered, appropriated and drawn upon by young people in two different countries to serve their own purposes.

scholarly journals Multimodal Literacy through Children’s Drawings in a Romani Community

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 90-104
Author(s):  
Hsiao‐Chin Kuo
Keyword(s):  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Funds Of Knowledge ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Children's Drawings ◽  
Multimodal Literacy ◽  
Research Directions ◽  
Multimodal Texts ◽  
Children’S Drawings ◽  
Future Research Directions

Being part of an ethnographic research project, which investigated the funds of knowledge and literacy practices of a Romani community in northwestern Romania, this paper presents an exploratory examination, seeking ways to understand drawings and sketches as multimodal texts produced by five Romani children in this community. In general, Romani people, living on the margins of society, have often been labeled illiterate and been discriminated against. The examination of these Romani children’s drawings and sketches illuminated two features of their multimodal literacy practices— intertextuality and design—and scrutinized the stereotype of illiteracy thrust upon the Romani people. Based on the examination of the multimodal literacy practices of these Romani children, implications are drawn, including pedagogical applications, and future research directions are suggested.

Multimodal Communication Practice in Nigeria's Digital Space

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-61
Author(s):  
Simon Shachia Oryila ◽  
Philip Chike Chukwunonso Aghadiuno
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Multimodal Communication ◽  
Multimodal Texts ◽  
Making Meaning ◽  
Communicative Acts ◽  
Communication Practice ◽  
Digital Space ◽  
Modes Of Representation ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Business Opportunities

For centuries, people have evolved novel ways of making meaning. With the passage of time, the various traditional modes of representation or meaning making have been altered and, in some cases, refined or displaced by technological advancements. In Nigeria, a growing academic interest seeks to explore the practical relevance of integrating semiotic resources, such as speech, writing, video, music, colours, or signs to create multimodal texts across a wide range of communicative acts. This chapter, therefore, examines multimodal communication practice within Nigeria's digital space, its nature, dimension, as well as how digital technologies are appropriated to enhance, not just the people's digital experience, but also create social, economic, and business opportunities for Nigeria's growing population of digital natives.

scholarly journals Transnational Literacies as Social Remittances: The Role of Language Ideologies in Shaping Migrants’ Online Literacies

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-319
Author(s):  
Tony Capstick
Keyword(s):  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Transnational Migration ◽  
Language And Literacy ◽  
Social Remittances ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Similar Vein ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract It is now twenty years since the term ‘social remittances’ was taken up to capture the notion that migration involves the circulation of ideas, practices, identities, and social capital between destination and origin countries, in addition to the more tangible circulation of money. In a similar vein, a social theory of literacy sees practices not as observable units of behaviour but rather as social processes which connect people. To identify how literacy practices can be seen as social remittances, I identify how Usman, the key respondent in this study, goes about describing his first six months in the UK by tracing the meaning-making trajectories in our interviews together. I then explore the language and literacy choices that his family and friends make on Facebook as they remit ideas, beliefs, and practices in their transnational literacies. I examine how these practices are shaped by beliefs about language. The article seeks to understand the relationship between migrants’ literacy practices before and after their migrations and how these practices remit ideas and beliefs which maintain transnational migration.

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