Developing Multimodal Texts as a Systemic Functional Approach to Teach Multimodal Literacy
Dr. Ancy Elezabath John, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Christian College, Chengannur, Kerala
Abstract
Multimodal literacy is a phrase that originates from the field of social semiotics. It refers to the study of language that combines two or more modes of meaning. A multimodal approach aims at improving the learner in an integrated way by implementing several elements which focus on the overall outcome and varying behaviour. In the context of a new socio semiotic milieu in communications, understanding, appreciating and exploring, multimodal texts are essential. Blended and multimodal learning paves way to various learning styles helping the learner to benefit differently. The teachers can implement unique learning styles that can guide the learners in leveraging resources that are compatible to them. Contemporary societies are grappling with the social changes caused by the current communication landscape and complex textual habitats. To integrate the multimodal perspective in language classes, highlighting the need to make students aware of the new dynamics of meaning making, meaning negotiation, and meaning distribution is done through multimodality.
Key Terms: Multimodality, New literacies, Blended learning
Introduction
In the context of a new socio semiotic milieu in communications, understanding, appreciating and exploring, multimodal texts are essential. There is a great demand for a change in the literacy practices. A great impact is felt in comprehending multimodal texts on second language reading. Multimodal projects focus on multiple “modes” of communicating a message. It is quite different from the way in which traditional papers were handled. Typically only one mode (text) played the key role in teaching –learning process. A multimodal project would include a combination of text, images, motion, or audio.
Blended and multimodal learning paves way to various learning styles helping the learner to benefit differently. The teachers can implement unique learning styles that can guide the learners in leveraging resources that are compatible to them. The learner gets the freedom to process information most effectively in the most suitable way he feels to express. Multi modal communication therapy enhances the level of self-confidence and true insertion. It leads to less dissatisfaction and helps in recuperating relationships which augment more effective community participation with increased independence.
Multimodal composition
Multimodal compositions in the field of Education have proliferated over recent decades. Multimodality-meaning making and texts that incorporate multiple modes, or different channels of communication-is a hallmark of learners' practices both in and out of schools with screen-based multimodal texts like videos, videogames and non-digital forms like use of signs, collages and live performances. Many studies have discussed the possibilities and challenges of multimodal literacy practices in teaching and learning.
Multimodal literacy is a phrase that originates from the field of social semiotics. It refers to the study of language that combines two or more modes of meaning. A multimodal approach aims at improving the learner in an integrated way by implementing several elements which focus on the overall outcome and varying behaviour. Multi Modal Communication uses different ways that we commonly make use of in communicating with each other, every day. This may be by the use of spoken language, texting, tweeting, emailing, handwriting, body language, gesturing, or by using a communication device. A crucial component of social interactions is to convey our ideas, thoughts, feelings, and opinions. Multimodal communication helps to handle this effectively. Multimodal pedagogy, as an umbrella term, refers to “curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment practices which focus on mode as a defining feature of communication in learning environments” (Stein & Newfield, 2006, p. 9).
Multimodality gives students the freedom to be creative and make persistent decisions in relation to how to communicate successfully and fruitfully to particular audiences. They are free to choose and incorporate elements of other languages in the text. This forms an explicit and tangible means by which students can develop their skilfulness as text analysts. Providing multimodal environment in a classroom will help to explore and learn through visual, actional and linguistic communication. Multimodal compositions can be used for assessing students' related to practices and possibilities through an interpretive amalgamation of literature. Assessment of students' multimodal compositions in classroom helps for experiential way of understanding literature and their findings are designed applying the methodology of the area.
Many texts are multimodal .To introduce multimodal literacy, multimodal texts that are pertinent to the purpose of a task or lesson are selected by the instructor, where meaning is communicated through combinations of two or more modes. To communicate effectively, live and digital multimedia platform is used. This unequivocally scaffolds how language combines with paper. Visual, auditory, reading and writing and kinaesthetic are four main methods of multimodal learning. Students may prefer one over the other but they get a glimpse of all the four methods. Based on this, findings and studies across the body of literature are reshaped and students take up different modes according to their need. It includes written language, spoken language, and patterns of meaning that are visual, audio, gestural, tactile and spatial.
A core benefit of blended and multimodal learning is the ability to train, equip and reach people who learn, benefit and acquire from various learning styles. It plays a great role in helping the instructors and students to identify their unique learning styles which can channelize them in leveraging resources that are compatible for them. Multimodal compositions are done for promoting multiliteracies approaches to learning. Evaluation of students, their level understanding and competence in continuum are measured with applying certain parameters and practical implications. Goals of assessment of student multimodal compositions offer guidance and highlights foundational differences across studies' purposes and for educations seeking to revise their practices. The assessment can be theoretical/philosophical, or oriented toward reshaping classroom practice or focused on ways of measuring student understanding. This type of assessment can reshape educational practices to be more even-handed, and helps the students to proportionate more theoretically with the ideas. They are able to include more thorough and accurate measures of subject knowledge.
Multimodal literacy
Teaching multimodal literacy effectively endow students to steer the multimodal communicative landscape. Developing multimodal literacy in students is about developing in them the ability to view multimodal texts critically and to represent their ideas through the production of effective multimodal texts. The changing nature of the forthcoming communicative setting fashioned by new technologies is heightening the need to expand the meaning and definition of literacy. Multimodal discourse analysis frameworks and approaches are used as instructional strategies. The following authors O ’Toole (2010), K ress and van Leeuwen (2006), and later extended by Lim-Fei and O’Halloran (2012), Tan, Marissa and O’Halloran (2012), O ’Halloran and Lim-Fei (2014), and Lim-Fei et al. (2015) have developed an approach to the teaching of visual texts as Multimodal discourse frameworks.
Visual texts are discourses that are constructed using only images or that have a combination of images and written or oral language. . Kress (2003: 1) argues that literacy in the new media age will involve "human, cognitive/affective, cultural and bodily engagement with the world and on the forms and shapes of knowledge ". He proposes a shift away from an alphabetic literacy and to explore the new forms of literacy needed in today's world. An instructional approach is developed to teach multimodal texts. It helps the students to understand the meanings made in multimodal texts by introducing the features and typical functions of the text. The common strategies used in multimodal texts are highlighted to make meaning. To be considered literate in this age one has to be able to communicate multimodality effectively.
With the availability of electronic devices in affordable price tags technology continues to advance. Communication, especially with multimedia and social media, involves not just language, but also the use of multimodal resources, such as images, videos, embodied action, and three-dimensional objects to make meanings in different contexts (Smith et al. 2014). Students need to develop complementary competencies not only in traditional domains, such as literacy and numeracy, which remain foundational, but also develop a fluency in multimodal literacy (Lim & Hung, 2016) and has become something pervasive in the lives of succeeding generations. Digital community where experiences are more readily available to the acquainted are both festooned by authors and determined by acculturated readers. Multimodal composing practices can potentially take advantage of the relation between cognition and affect which leads to cultural means of codification. In doing so mapping the multimodal composition for assessing students' multimodal compositions are possible. An interpretive synthesis of the literature related to changes in all these educational practices leads to continued discussion and change regarding the role of multimodal composition in teaching and learning.
Educational practices can be made more effective through promoting multiliteracies approaches to learning. Students can be evaluated by understanding multimodal compositions that checks competence, practices and opens possibilities for reshaping educational practices which leads to rethinking and reshaping them. Different semiotic modes can be implemented in making meaning and communicating ideas. Multimodal literacies have emerged as intrinsic to the learning, teaching and assessment of English in the Twenty-First Century. The teacher centric methodology is transformed to a learner friendly mode. It helps in the emergence of contents that are creative and productive along with subject traditions tied to the study of language, literature and media. Newer methods of learning can be implemented in understanding and learning a thought process or idea. Multimodal texts and new technologies are now accorded overdue recognition in curriculum documents in several countries.
Approaches in Multimodality
Multimodality approaches refers to a field of application rather than a theory. A variety of disciplines and approaches can be used to explore different aspects of the multimodal landscape. Psychological theories can be applied to look at how people distinguish different modes to understand the impact of one mode over another and how effective one method is over other in memory retention. Sociological and anthropological interests could be applied to look at how communities use multimodal standards to mark and maintain identities. The term multimodality is concerned with signs and is strongly linked with social semiotic theory. It is widely used to stand for 'multimodal social semiotics'. It starts from the position that like speech and writing all modes consists of sets of semiotic resources that people represent and constitute in particular moments and spaces to be a symbol of events and relations.
Teachers have to develop more substantive content knowledge and creative methods of analysing various systems. The modal resources a teacher chooses to use are significant for teaching and learning. Multimodal approach rejects the traditional almost habitual conjunction of language and learning. Multimodal approach opens a larger vista of looking at language as a nestled and embedded system within a wider social semiotic structure. Examining multimodal discourses across the classroom makes more visible the relationship between the use of semiotic resources by teachers and students and the production of curriculum knowledge, student subjectivity, and pedagogy.
The notion of multimodality and multimodal analysis as a theoretical and methodological approach is intrinsic to the learning, teaching and assessment of English in the Twenty-First Century. With subject traditions tied to the study of language, literature and media, multimodal texts and new technologies are now accorded applicability to the study of intercultural communication. The conceptual basis of multimodality and its, practical aspects of conducting multimodal research, overdue recognition in English curriculum documents in several countries, though assessment tends to remain largely print-centric.
Assessment modes and practices have to align with the nature of multimodal text production along with the potential of mixed-method approaches value as sites for inquiry. In assessing the multimodal texts that students create the central concepts of multimodality and what is involved in “working multimodally” to create a multimodal text is considered. Here, “transmodal operation” and “staged multimodality” are considered as central concepts to “working multimodally”. Cultural shifts, multimodal representations, and assessment practices can be understood in terms of cognition and culture.
Multimodal texts involve the presence, absence, and co-occurrence of alphabetic text with visual, audio, tactile, gestural, and spatial representations. Evaluation of students' multimodal work is to be done with digital tools. Students' content learning and meaning-making processes that draw on diverse semiotic resources and involve multiple modes of representation is to be assessed perfectly. It offers new ways of analysing a range of different modes that people use to make meaning beyond language –such as speech, gesture, gaze, image and writing in a language. A social semiotic approach to multimodality is done in an approach with case studies of classroom interaction and textbooks. Potentials and constraints of multimodal analysis shape principles of design and multimodality become internalized as psychological tools that form learning in the context of activity.
Conclusion
In new times of digitally accessible multimodality for designing texts for social purposes, changes are essential in the field of education. Interpreting and designing multimodal texts will increasingly be required by human beings to communicate, work, and thrive in the digital, global world of the 21st century. The key changes are needed for teachers to transform the teaching and learning in their classrooms towards multimodal composing. Explicit multimodal design instruction and attention is to be provided. Multimodal composing activities that draw attention on their identity life worlds as resources is to be designed. Functional social spaces are to be created to arbitrate multimodal learning.
Contemporary societies are grappling with the social changes caused by the current communication landscape and complex textual habitats. To integrate the multimodal perspective in language classes, highlighting the need to make students aware of the new dynamics of meaning making, meaning negotiation, and meaning distribution is to be done. A rising number of English language learners acquire proficiency in digital and multimodal literacy practices in their daily lives. Multimodal approaches are incorporated by teachers into the curriculum. Multimodal literacy practices are now integrated into teacher education for teaching English to speakers of other languages. There is an increase in the incorporation of multimodal practices into ESL/EFL classes. Multimodal practices facilitate the students' learning of content knowledge and their professional development. It helps in appealing and fascinating content learning, retaining and intensifying knowledge, fostering shared learning in online community, enhancing digital learning, and nurturing inspiration to apply multimodal pedagogy.
Works Cited
Kate Anderson. 2019, English Teaching: Practice and Critique,
https://doi.org/10.1108/ETPC-11-2018-0092
Kress Gunther. 2003. Literacy in the New Media Age. Routledge:London.
Smith, J. D., Boomer, J., Zakrzewski, A. C., Roeder, J., Church, B. A., & Ashby, F. G. 2014. Deferred feedback sharply dissociates implicit and explicit category learning. Psychological Science.
Stein, P. & Newfield, D. 2006. Multiliteracies and multimodality in English in education in Africa: Mapping the terrain. English Studies in Africa.
Fei Victor, Serene Tan. Multimodal Translational Research: Teaching Visual Texts. https://www.academia.edu.