Extending students’ semiotic understandings : learning about and creating multimodal texts

Communication in the world in multimodal. When we interact with others online, face to face or with the artefacts of our culture, we are interpreting meanings developed through combinations of modes: written, spoken, audio, visual, and gestural. Conveying meaning to another is no longer the provenance of the written word alone (Kress 2001, 2003). Being able to convey our thoughts through a combination of modes has become an essential skill in order to fully participate in society (Kress 2010; Serafini 2010). While literacy is still viewed as a socially situated cultural practice (Green and Beavis 2013; Street 1984), what counts as literacy and literate practices has changed (Lankshear and Knobel 2006; New London Group 2000). Literacy education, it can thus be reasoned, needs to take into account this changing 'textual habitat' (Unsworth 2008, p. 4) if it intends to meet its 'utilitarian brief of preparing young people for the present and future world' (Green and beavis 2013, p. 44).