Genres are not what they used to be. They are both more and less. More in the sense that today many genres of interest are increasingly multimodal, making their meanings through the co- deployment of resources from both language and other semiotic systems. Less in the sense that as people cross institutional and genre boundaries on shorter and shorter timescales (surfing across television channels from genre to genre, across websites from institution to institution, and living their lives between as well as within multiple jobs, tasks, and institutions), we in- creasingly not only hybridize formerly insulated genres, but we now also make meaning along our traversals across traditional genres. Genres are becoming units, raw material, for flexible trans-generic constructions: resources for meaning in a new, externally-oriented sense. Looking at genre from these contemporary viewpoints provides insights into the phenomenon of genre from new functional perspectives,
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.
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 sufficient 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