Describe an important site of multimodal communication in your life, or your students' lives.

I have devoted much of my recent work to teaching English for Academic Puposes, which is essentially centered on teaching academic communicative practice. I use a multiliteracies approach which, accordingly, centers on multimodal interpretation, representation, and communication. Engaging with multimedia and digital texts is often a central feature of my teaching, either using images or short films and videos. An important site of multimodal communication in my life is therefore my language and communication classroom where I can interact with my students while simultaneously intereacting with digital culture through classroom technologies.

A good starting point might be choosing historically imporant and iconic photos. For example the following photo might be useful.

We can have students discuss these photos following critical thinking and reflective questions, ensuring that students engage with the different metafuctions of visual grammar.

How might a multimodal analysis of meaning prove useful?

Excellent class activities can be elaborated based on dimensions of visual learning, including oral presentations, group debates, media analysis (media literacy framework) as well as producing media and images to be shared on various social web platforms. When students interact and interpret digital texts that are relevant, provocative and meaningful to contemporary society, it allows students to not only develop language competencies, but also critical thinking and multimodal analysis competencies.

An example of a digital text that I use for multimodal analysis, using the meta functions of communication that academics in the multimodality field have elaborated include The Google Search 2015 Video. Using a multimodal analysis is helpful in understanding how the video works together to make meaning. The following questions prove very useful.

Cope and Kalantzis 2016 Multimodal Literacies Video

How does this compare with traditional notions of literacy?

Traditional notions of literacy and language teaching are so far removed from the notion of multimodality that, in my view, teaching from a traditional view of both literacy and language learning seems like an impoverished form of both teaching and learning. We need to teach about the expansive nature of meaning making in our hyper-digitalized and globally networked society.

Kress, Gunther. Van Heeuwan, Leo. (1996) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. Routledge Press