Popular culture in the classroom : Interpreting and creating multimodal texts

Daily, students engage with a range of texts from different modes: they watch TV, play video games and use game consoles; they read magazines and children's literature; they talk to peers and adults; they search for information from print and electronic sources; they discuss their views on programs, music, pop stars, movies and actors, as well as read about them; they chat online and send SMS messages to each other. But in the classroom the texts students engage with do not necessarily represent this multiplicity of types, modes or media. Ideally, the classroom should prepare learners for multimodal literacy. Thus, literacy educators need to provide for the impact of new texts, new literacies and new information and communication technologies (ICTs). For many this involves the recognition of the need for critical media literacy or critical literacy to inform praxis in schools in order to enable students to be analytical, to question the texts that they are exposed to and use this knowledge in the creation of texts in similar contexts.