ABSTRACT: The increasingly integrative use of images with language in many different types of texts in electronic and paper media has created an urgent need to go beyond logocentric accounts of literacy and literacy pedagogy. Correspondingly there is a need to augment the genre, grammar and discourse descriptions of verbal text as resourcesfor literacy pedagogy to include descriptions of the meaning-making resources of images. Some augmentation along these lines has involved the articulation of Hallidayan systemic functional descriptions of language, mainly focussed on verbal grammar, with the social semiotic descriptions of the meaning-making resources of images described in a grammar of visual design proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen. However, current research indicates that articulating discrete visual and verbal grammars is not sitfficient to account for meanings made at the intersection of language and image. This paper adopts a systemic functional semiotic perspective in outlining a range of different types of such meanings in different kinds of texts, suggesting the significance of such meanings in comprehending and composing contemporary multimodal texts, and the importance of developing an appropriate metalanguage to enable explicit discussion of these meaning- making resources by teachers and students.
Unsworth applies Halliday's SFL analysis to multimodal texts. Brings together from a range of studies concepts for describing the semiotics of image and word and crucially how these modes make meaning in combination with each other. Cases mostly drawn from books for children.
This work illustrates how a meaningful metalanguage can support
L2 learners in accomplishing challenging tasks in the primary school curriculum at the same time that it promotes the kind of focused consciousness-raising and explicit talk about language that has been shown to facilitate L2 development.
Towards a Metalanguage for Multiliteracies Education: Describing the Meaning-Making Resources of Language-Image Interaction
Author(s):
Unsworth, Len
Source:
English Teaching: Practice and Critique, v5 n1 p55-76 May 2006. 22 pp.
EAL sociocultural theory with lots of background, then ideas for the class. How to move kids along in the ZPD. Considers feedback in relation to ZPD and importance of meta-language