Purpose
The paper shows the interpretive impact of different constructions of the point of view available to the reader/viewer in book and animated movie versions of a children's picture book, a ...novel for pre-adolescents/early teenagers, and a graphic novel for adolescents and adults.
Design/Approach/Methods
Excerpts from book and animated movie versions of the same story are compared using multimodal analysis of interpersonal meaning to show how the reader/viewer is positioned in relation to the characters in each version, complemented by analyses of ideational meaning to show the effect of point of view on interpretive possibilities.
Findings
Focusing mainly on multimodal construction of point of view, the analyses show how interpretive possibilities of ostensibly the same story are significantly reconfigured in animated adaptations compared with book versions even when the verbal narrative remains substantially unchanged.
Originality/Value
The study shows that it is crucial to students’ critical appreciation of, and their creative contribution to, their evolving digital literary culture that in this new era of educational technology, attention in literacy and literary education focuses on developing understandings of digital multimodal narrative art, and that animated movie adaptations are not presented pedagogically as isomorphic with, or simply adjunct to, corresponding book versions.
Interpreting the image-language interface in multimodal texts is now well recognized as a crucial aspect of reading comprehension in a number of official school syllabi such as the recently published ...Australian Curriculum: English (ACE). This article outlines the relevant expected student learning outcomes in this curriculum and draws attention to the need for further research to provide a robust and comprehensive account of the nature of image-language relations to explicate these intended outcomes in a manner that will support multimodal literacy pedagogy. Recent semiotic accounts of image-language interaction are outlined and related to the results of a study showing the relative comprehension difficulty of different kinds of image-language relations. Also discussed in relation to this study are the extent to which the current Australian national assessment program in reading addresses the image-language interface and the nature of the image-language relations included in this assessment program. This research suggests that the current discrepant emphases on the image-language interface in the ACE and the national assessment program could be brought much more into alignment to generate an assessment program that more adequately addresses reading as the integrative negotiation of visual and verbal information. This could provide not only more curriculum responsive national literacy tests but could also improve tests such as the Program for International Student Assessment so that the range of image-language relations included in them more adequately reflects those encountered in school and everyday reading materials.
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.
Literacy for Digital Futures Mills, Kathy A; Unsworth, Len; Scholes, Laura
2023, 20220930, 2022, 2022-09-30, Letnik:
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Odprti dostop
The unprecedented rate of global, technological, and societal change calls for a radical, new understanding of literacy. This book offers a nuanced framework for making sense of literacy by ...addressing knowledge as contextualised, embodied, multimodal, and digitally mediated. In today’s world of technological breakthroughs, social shifts, and rapid changes to the educational landscape, literacy can no longer be understood through established curriculum and static text structures. To prepare teachers, scholars, and researchers for the digital future, the book is organised around three themes – Mind and Materiality; Body and Senses; and Texts and Digital Semiotics – to shape readers’ understanding of literacy. Opening up new interdisciplinary themes, Mills, Unsworth, and Scholes confront emerging issues for next-generation digital literacy practices. The volume helps new and established researchers rethink dynamic changes in the materiality of texts and their implications for the mind and body, and features recommendations for educational and professional practice.
The significance of the role of students' interpretation and creation of multiple forms of representation in science learning has long been established and advocated, but there is a paucity of ...research into the extent to which this
emphasis in science education is reflected in high stakes final year high school science examinations. This study investigated the inclusion of visualizations in the questions within such examinations that require students to construct a
response, and also the extent to which such questions required students to create or modify diagrams or graphs within their responses. Examinations in physics, biology and chemistry from the Cambridge International Examination, New
Zealand, Singapore and the States of New South Wales and Victoria in Australia over a six-year period (2014-2019) were analysed. The results indicate that less than one third of constructed response item (CRI) questions include
visualisations, with most occurring in physics, then biology and then chemistry. An infinitesimally small percentage of questions across all subjects and in all but one of the jurisdictions required the creation or augmentation of
visualisations. The misalignment between the integral role of visualizations in science pedagogy and the paucity of visualizations in CRIs in final year high school examinations as well as implications for examination re-design and
associated further research are discussed. Author abstract
This volume presents an overview of new developments and applications of social semiotic theory. Pioneered by M.A.K. Halliday, social semiotic theory sees meaning as created through the interaction ...of texts (including writing, images, sound and space) within a given context. Divided into five sections, the contributors use social semiotic theory to analyse a range of contexts, including the classroom,ÃÂ the museum and cinema. The case studies show the range and scope of this method of analysis, and include: the school curriculum; literacy; print media; online resources; film; and advertising. ÃÂ Multimodal Semiotics will be of interest to academics researching social semiotic theory, systemic functional linguisticsÃÂ and applied linguistics.
An educational chasm divides the Australian National Curriculum, which is permeated with detailed requirements for students to develop multimodal literacy, and the very substantially mono-modal ...literacy of the reading tests of the Australian National Assessment Program in Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). This paper proposes that mandated centralised large-scale testing approaches to literacy assessment, such as NAPLAN, need to be re-thought and reformed to be consistent with curriculum requirements in relation to multimodal literacy and with the multimodal nature of international tests such as Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and, most importantly, to influence and support teachers in ensuring that students acquire essential multimodal literacy competencies in the twenty-first century. This paper firstly demonstrates that the interaction of language and image in multimodal texts are integral to the nature of the multimodal literacy that is increasingly needed to negotiate the vast majority of texts we encounter in all domains of our lives, and are reflected in national curriculum documents. Secondly, analyses of international tests such as TIMSS and PISA show the significant proportion of assessment items that specifically address images and image-language relations for correct responses to test items. Thirdly, we provide analyses of the NAPLAN reading tests from 2008-2016, showing the minimal proportion of test items that deal with images and image-language relations. NAPLAN results contrast markedly with the former NSW Basic Skills Tests (BST), which show a significantly higher proportion of test items that dealt with image-language interaction. Fourthly, we reiterate that the paucity of attention to images in NAPLAN demonstrates that this mandated national literacy assessment does not assess multimodal literacy. This signals a strong need for re-thinking and reforming of NAPLAN, and similar large-scale literacy tests so that assessment approaches will more effectively contribute to enhancing the students' multimodal literacy development. Implications of the paper for supportive action by administrators, teachers and researchers towards such reform are briefly noted. Author abstract
Since the image shows the boy from a long distance it is not possible to discern any affect in his facial appearance. According to Kress and van Leeuwen (2001/2006) when the horizontal angle is such ...that the frontal plane of the represented participants is parallel to the frontal plane of the viewer, this indicates maximum involvement of the viewer in the world of the represented participants. ...while the book constructs the reader's engagement as appreciative, the movie constructs empathetic viewer engagement. ...while the short story segments examined in this paper yielded a very substantial semiotic basis for discussing the interpretive possibilities of the different versions of the story, clearly such texts support very extensive investigative alternatives, suitable for informing classroom work for students from the middle primary/elementary school to senior high school.
Issues of race periodically rupture in the national and international consciousness, while at other times, there is a false belief that society has arrived at a post-racial era. Either way, there ...remains impetus for the critical interrogation of the racialisation of multimodal literacies in education, and critical race theory (CRT) is a leading approach. This article reviews original studies that collectively analyse multimodal texts and practices to understand the construction of race in education. Multimodal texts have proliferated in online textual ecologies due to the ease of production and rapid global dissemination of image-based texts in the twenty-first century. Such texts combine two or more modes, such as images, words, sounds, and gestures. Sites for the circulation of multimodal literacies - online and offline - serve to disrupt, reify, or perhaps even exacerbate racial identities, prejudice, and subordination in education. The review highlights the prevalent themes: (a) Discursive construction of race in the spoken mode, (b) Anti-racist and multimodal counter-narratives, (c) The racialisation of multimodal literature for children and adolescents, and (d) Race in music, visual and performing arts, and digital media. Gaps in CRT research and challenges are posed for future research of race in the context of cultural and technological change.
In a complex communicational environment and at the dawn of an Australian curriculum, teachers need new kinds of knowledge about language (KAL). Our paper investigates the character of a 'good ...enough' KAL through 'grammatics' - a metalanguage based on careful study of grammar - a way of thinking with grammar in mind. It identifies four challenges facing any grammatics that is going to be adequate to the discipline: (1) Building a coherent account of KAL for contemporary English; (2) Fashioning a rhetorical grammatics for improving students' compositions; (3) Improving continuity and cumulative learning through the years of schooling; and (4) Developing a grammatics adequate to multimodal communication. Our paper draws on the resources of systemic functional grammatics to explore these challenges and considers the implications for teachers and students.
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