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A Learning 2gether presentation byTuba Angay-CrowderPh.D student at Language and Literacy, Georgia State University

Multimodality vs. Multiliteracies?

+Topics to be discussed in this meeting? If the terms, multimodality and multiliteracies do not describe a new

phenomenon, then, why the long tongue-twisting words?

What purpose do they serve (affordances of theory and/or pedagogy?

Similarities and differences in meaning between these two terms?

What are the tools of multiliteracies?

What is role of out-of-school literacies in realizing the theories of multimodality and multiliteracies?

How have the theories been implemented so far? What is missing in the literature or in classroom practices?

Issues of implementing the theories in education?

How should we achieve criticality in multiliteracies?

Implications for future research or teaching?

Ant other topic or issue you would like to address?

Suggestions?

+Multimodality vs. Multiliteracies? Introduction Accounts of multimodality and multiliteracies emphasize the

many ways and contexts in which people experience communication and come to develop understandings.

Multimodality and multiliteracies may be newly-coined words, apparently new theories, but they do not explicitly describe new phenomena. For instance, the everyday experiences of every individual are multimodal: we see, we hear, we touch, we smell, and we taste. Our experience of the world comes to us through the multiple modes of communication to which each of our senses is attuned.

The multimodal activity encompass the Design elements or meaning making modes - linguistic, visual, spatial, gestural and audio. The difference lies in multiliteracies providing a site for student engagement with real life problems and learning, along with an integrated curriculum and active implementation of productive pedagogies (lyer & Luke, 2010).

+Multimodality Kress (2009) conceptualizes multimodality as a “domain

of inquiry” (p. 54). Media offer multiple modal possibilities, moving away from the linear toward a more modular design framework. According to Kress (2010), there are four foundational tenets of social semiotics: signs are made in social interaction; they are motivated rather than arbitrary; they arise from the interests of the sign makers; and, they become part of the semiotic resources of a culture. Consistent with poststructuralist (Pavlenko, 2002) and sociocultural (van Lier, 2004) theories of language, social semiotics treats sign making as interactive, dialogic, and constantly evolving. In response to the changing social and semiotic backcloth, multimodality researchers (Kress & V. Leeuwen, 2001; Jewitt & Kress, 2003; Jewitt, 2005) claim that meanings are constructed through multiple representational and communicational resources (e.g., visuals, written and spoken linguistic codes, sound, gesture, gaze, and spatial concepts).

+Why Multimodalities?

Multimodality, or the application of various Designs such as linguistic, visual, audio, spatial and gestural are perceived as integral to contemporary learning (Iyer & Luke, 2010)

Interests in multimodality in education have been generated by the increasing use of multimedia in the classroom, from image manipulation software to electronic music-making packages, to science simulations, and to virtual theatres that exist on computers.

While multimodality is not exclusively new, then, it is clearly important for us to be able to accurately describe the altered landscape of communication that young people are growing up in. Likewise, their experiences of learning will be increasingly visual, aural and interactive, not simply because they will have better access to computers, but because teachers no longer simply speak at children, and children no longer simply read texts and write down responses.

+Why Multimodalities? Multimodality is an attempt to theorize these multiple forms of

communication, identifying how multiple modes such as images, words, and actions all depend on each other to create whole meanings. A very good example of this is provided in Kress et al's (2001) Multimodal Teaching and Learning: The Rhetorics of the Science Classroom. They analyze a short sequence of actions in a science classroom as a teacher attempts to describe the workings of the human heart. Variously, the teacher uses spoken words, a freehand line diagram drawn on a whiteboard, a rubber model of a heart, a textbook illustration, and his hands to communicate with his class.

Importantly, what the authors point out is that at times each individual mode depends on other modes to complete the communicative act. Without spoken words, the diagram would not make sense; without the model heart, the rhythmic gesture of the hand would not make sense, and so on. Each mode, then, as a semiotic resource, contributes to the meaning being made. It is then the task of the child involved in learning to transform the teacher's repertoire of modes and semiotic resources into understandings.

+Multiliteracies The concept of multiliteracies was proposed by New London Group

(1996) to address “the multiplicity of communications channels and media, and the increasing saliency of cultural and linguistic diversity” (p. 63). The term refers to the "increasing complexity and interrelationship of different modes of meaning" (The New London Group, 2000, p. 25).

Multiliteracies have challenged a customary assumption that “the affordances of written verbal texts far outstrip what can be offered by or offered in conjunction with other modalities” (Benson, 2008, p. 227). The notion of multiliteracies has at its center the idea of a “social and culturally responsive curriculum” (Jewitt, 2008, p. 245) and consider agendas that advocate social change.

The concept has a holistic and inclusive meaning. It is a means to comprehend literacy curriculum as extending beyond formal school learning and as inclusive of productive participation in the community. Multiliteracies is, moreover, dedicated to coming to terms with the post-Fordist society that is invested in mobility, fluidity and a knowledge society that promotes multiple forms of semiotic systems (see Kalantzis & Cope, 2004).

As Fairclough (2000, p. 171) observes, multiliteracies encompasses the twin notions of cultural hybridity and multimodality.

+ The multiliteracies approach is invested in productive

pedagogies and ensure best practice, high quality teaching by promoting metalanguage awareness, higher order thinking , analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Multiliteracies promotes deep understanding of various interrelated yet diverse concepts and Designs; furthermore it presents knowledge as problematic by allowing students to manipulate and challenge, for example, stories that people share. Students become create and innovative (lyer & Luke, 2010).

As Cazden (2000) affirms, "the Multiliteracies framework stresses the importance of opportunities for learning new discourse skills, oral and written ,through a lifetime of changing social and employment contexts" (p. 261 ).

+Purpose of multiliteracies? When people talk of multiliteracies, what they mean is the

ability to read all of these media and the modes made available by them, and eventually to produce through them too. Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis provide good examples including 'reading' websites or interactive multimedia. It is clear that traditional literacy practices alone (being able to read and produce printed text) are insufficient for this age of multimedia.

Multiliteracies go beyond dealing with the technical aspect of the electronic medium and include engaging with others through the new technologies and using these creatively as well as critically. Teachers have a dual responsibility: to select the most appropriate tool for the job and to make the most creative use of the affordances of the tool they have chosen.

The concept of multiliteracies has also a critical dimension – Literacy also needs to include the awareness that representational resources are social practices constructed by a particular society and are therefore limited. (Lankshea and Knobel, 2003)

+New London Group (1996) advocates a theory of pedagogy that integrates four components: (a) situated practice, (b) overt instruction, (c) critical framing, and (d) transformed practice. These components were a theoretical foundation for our curriculum for the digital storytelling class, and here we briefly explain these components.

Situated practice is an “immersion in language use” (Kern, 2000, p. 133), an “immersion in meaningful practices within a community of learners who are capable of playing multiple and different roles based on their background and experiences” (NLG, 1996, p. 85). Through situated practice, communities of learners are guided as “masters of practice” (p. 84). Overt instruction does not imply direct drills or rote memorization but includes “active interventions on the part of the teacher and other experts that scaffold learning activities . . . that allow the learner to gain explicit information. . .” (p. 86). It helps students develop “conscious awareness and control over what is being learned” (p. 86) and use an explicit metalanguage that describes various processes and elements contributing to meaning. Here, collaborative efforts between teacher and student are critical to overt instruction.

+A theory of pedagogy for multiliteracies (Cont.)

Despite important roles of situated practice and overt instruction in literacy pedagogy, they are insufficient to help students develop critical or cultural understanding of language and literacy; thus, two other components (i.e., critical framing and transformed practice) must be supplemented for an efficacious pedagogy. Through critical framing, students distance themselves from what they have learned and mastered, critique their learning, and extend and apply their learning in new contexts, which involves both cognitive and social dimensions of literacy pedagogy. Transformed practice involves students’ transfer, reformulation, and redesign of existing texts and meaning-making practice from one context to another. A certain degree of tension exists when students engage in transformed practice, especially when they juxtapose and integrate different discourses and remake their own realities or discourses to suit their needs and purposes. Importantly, these four components are often interrelated, and an integration of four components is necessary for effective literacy teaching and learning (Kasper, 2000).

+The word multiliteracies refers to the literacies used today

Some of these literacies are:

Technological literacy

Visual literacy

Media literacy

Information literacy

+ Technological literacy refers to the skills needed to adequately use

computers.

Visual literacy , probably the oldest literacy, dates back to interpreting cave drawing and has evolved to competently decoding and comprehending the icons on the tool bar, navigating the Web, and encoding images in multimedia projects. John Debes, one of the most important figures in the history of the International Visual Literacy Association, first coined the term visual literacy in 1969 as “a group of vision-competencies a human being can develop by seeing and at the same time having and integrating other sensory experiences”(International Visual Literacy Association, n.d.)

Media literacy refers to the necessary skills to access, evaluate, and create messages in written and oral language, graphics and moving images, and audio and music. In addition, media literacy requires the composer of multiple texts to select graphics, moving images, narration, and music that complement the multimedia project. Media literacy also recognizes the role of media in a society and the skills of inquiry and self-expression necessary for citizens in a democratic society (Center for Media Literacy, n.d.).

Information literacy is the ability to find, evaluate, analyze, and synthesize information. The development of the World Wide Web dramatically changed the availability, method, depth, quantity, and sometimes quality of accessible information; consequently, the Internet has initiated critical reading skills not typically required in traditional texts.

(Sylvester & Greenidge, 2010).

+Emerging tools of multiliteracies Emerging tools and multimodal practices for the studies of second

language literacy are instant messaging (Lam & Rosario-Ramos, 2009; Lee, 2007), online journaling (Guzzetti & Gamboa, 2005), fanfiction (Black, 2005; Black, 2009b; Chandler-Olcott & Mahar, 2003a, Lam, 2000), manga (Fukunaga, 2008), weblogs (Huffaker & Calvert, 2005; Oravec, 2002) wikis (Doering, Beach & O’Brien, 2007; Leander & McKim, 2003; Rowsell & Pahl, 2007), internet (Black, 2009a; Cilesiz, 2009; Davies, 2006; Thorne & Black, 2007), chat spaces (Lam, 2004), 2-D drawings, 3-D figures (Stein, 2003, 2007), videos and digital storytelling (Ayaji, 2011a, 2011b; Hull, 2003; Hull & Katz, 2006), digital dual language books (Cummins, 2005; Stille, 2011), remixing (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006) and redesigning media texts (Chandler-Olcott & Mahar, 2003a, 2003b), and games (Anderson et al., 2008; Coleman, 1990; Gee, 2003, 2008; Peterson, 2010; Thorne et al., 2009; Zhao & Lai, 2009; Zheng et al., 2009). Few researchers such as Yi (2007, 2008) and McLean (2010) researched on diasporic spaces, where participants could be involved in a variety of L1 and L2 voluntary literacy activities such as Internet novels, comics, quotes, reviews of popular music and movies, poetry, news articles.

+Design The concept of design is essential in the discussions of

multiliteracies and multimodality, and it is critical to understand multimodal literacies. Design refers to “how people make use of the resources that are available at a given moment in a specific communicational environment to realize their interest as sign makers” (Jewitt, 2008, p. 252). New London Group (1996) considers any semiotic activity as a matter of Design. They view “semiotic activity as a creative application and combination of conventions that, in the process of Design, transforms at the same time that it reproduces these conventions” (p. 74). In the process of design, Kress (2010) suggested that transformation and transduction are essential in making a designer agentive. This consideration is helpful at examining students and teachers who use multiple modes “as available resources for meaning making in the classroom” (Jewitt, 2008, p. 252). Furthermore, it allows us to understand identity construction as students are in the process of “ongoing design and redesign of identities across the social and cultural practices of meaning making” (Jewitt, 2008, p. 260). In brief, the new media that offer the chance of composing multimodally is “an opportunity to contribute a newly invigorated literate tradition and to enrich our available means of signification” (Hull & Nelson, 2005, p. 226).

+Why the long tongue-twisting words? We are beginning to witness a shift away from the written and

spoken word as the dominant means of communication, and increasingly seeing diverse visual and aural forms of public communication such as film, music, multimedia, the internet, and computer games gain in popularity and cultural importance.

We create multiple meanings that are offered by these modes, and thus we have multiple possible understandings. The meanings that we construe from particular moments of multimodal communication are inextricably linked to our previous experiences, personal histories, our cultures, communities, and identities as individuals. The idea that there is one standard set of meanings for all is no longer considered true. Rather, the available meanings taken from any instance of communication are potentially multiple

+ As Cope and Kalantzis (2000) reaffirm, "literacy is in its

nature multimodal- a matter of visual as well as linguistic design" (p.234).

Moving away from the transmission mode has meant an insightful engagement at the curriculum orientation level with the four knowledge processes (Kalantzis & Cope 2005, p.64) in a conscious and critical manner

Briefly, as explained by Kalantzis and Cope (2005, p.73), these four knowledge processes are: experiencing the known and the new, conceptualizing through naming and theorizing, analyzing functionally and critically, applying appropriately and creatively

+Multimodality and Multiliteracies

The terms multimodality, and multiliteracies, then, are attempts to account for the diversity in communications that are encountered in everyday life, and how these affect what we make of them. In explicitly educational settings, what is important is promoting children's recognition that all forms of communication, including spoken and written words, images, actions, sounds and so on, are related to particular designs of meaning, from diverse cultures, contexts, and historical periods.

+Summary

The terms of multimodality and multiliteracies are important, firstly, so that young people can become responsible producers of meaning, able to identify and make use of the variety of modes of communication that will be required of them throughout their lives; and secondly, so that they are adequately equipped to be able to identify how they, as citizens, are influenced by the communicative practices which surround them on a daily basis. Without educating young people to develop these understandings, according to this school of thought, they will be unable to constructively critique anything they have learned, unable to account for its cultural location, or creatively extend or apply it; they will only grow into unquestioning adults incapable of innovation.

+References Benson, S. (2008). A Restart of What Language Arts Is: Bringing Multimodal Assignments Into

Secondary Language Arts. Journal of Advanced Academics, (19)4, 634-674.

Cazden, C. (2000). Taking cultural differences into account. In B. Cope & M. Kalantzis (Eds.), Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the de sign of social futures (pp. 249·266). London: Routledge.

Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (Eds.). (2000) Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures. New York: Routledge.

Hull, G. A., & Nelson, M. E. (2005). Locating the semiotic power of multimodality. Written Communication, (22)2, 224–261.

lyer, R. & Luke, C. (2010). Multimodal, multiliteracies; Texts and literacies for the 21st century. Multiliteracies and Technology Enhanced Education; Social Practice and the Global Classroom, 18-33.

Jewitt, C., & Kress, G. (Eds.). (2003). Multimodal literacy. New York: Peter Lang.

Jewitt, C. (2008). Multimodality and literacy in school classrooms: Review of research in Education. Review of Research in Education, (32)1, 241-267.

Kasper, L. F. (2000). New technologies, new literacies: Focus discipline research and ESL learning communities. Language, Learning, and Technology, 4(2), 105-128.

Kern, R. (2000). Literacy and language teaching. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kist, W. (2005). New literacies in action: Teaching and learning in multiple media. New York: Teachers College Press.

Kalantzis, M., & Cope, B. (2004). Designs for learning. £-Learning , 1( l), 38-93

Kress, G. (2000). Multimodality: Challenges to thinking about language. TESOL Quarterly, (34)2, 337–340.

Kress, G., Jewitt, C., Ogbon, J., & Tsatsarelies, C. (2001). Multimodal teaching and learning: The rhetorics of the science classroom. London: Continuum.

+References Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal discourse. London: Edward Arnold

Kress, G. (2009). What is a mode? In C. Jewitt (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis (pp. 54–67). Abingdon, UK: Routledge

Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. London: Routledge.

Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. (2003). New literacies: Changing knowledge and classroom practice. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.

New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, (66)1, 60-92.

Pavlenko, A. (2002). Poststructuralist approaches to the study of social factors in second language learning and use. In V. Cook (Ed.), Portraits of the L2 user (pp. 277–302). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters

Rowsell, J., & Pahl, K. (2007). Sedimented identities in texts: Instances of practice. Reading Research Quarterly, (42)3, 388–404.

Sylvester, R., & Greenidge, W. (2010). Digital storytelling: Extending the potential for struggling writers. The Reading Teacher, 63 (4), 284-295

Willianson, B. What are multimodality, multisemiotics and multiliteracies? Retrieved from Futurelab on December, 18, 2012, http://archive.futurelab.org.uk/resources/publications-reports-articles/web-articles/Web-Article532

van Lier, L. (2004). The Ecology and Semiotics of Language Learning: A Sociocultural

Perspective. Boston: Kluwer Academic