MULTILITERACY ADVANCES AND MULTIMODAL CHALLENGES IN ELT ENVIRONMENTS

Abstract

NICOLETTA VASTA, ANTHONY BALDRY (Editors) MULTILITERACY ADVANCES AND MULTIMODAL CHALLENGES IN ELT ENVIRONMENTS Udine: Forum, 2020, 224 pp. ISBN: 978-88-3283-153-5

NICOLETTA VASTA, ANTHONY BALDRY (Editors) MULTILITERACY ADVANCES AND MULTIMODAL CHALLENGES IN ELT ENVIRONMENTS Udine: Forum, 2020, 224 pp. ISBN: 978-88-3283-153-5

The volume consists of seven chapters, each an account of research efforts advocating for the redesign of the language teaching curriculum meant to better equip students and teachers to respond to the needs of the 21st century, when their competences should allow for an intersemiotic, multiliterate and multimodal decoding and understanding of different types of messages encoded with the help of digital resources. The volume comprises step-by-step illustrations of various instructional strategies used for the development of students critical multiliteracy awareness, as well as specific details of digital-tool usage in multimodal reading and ascription of meaning. The clear descriptions of research findings target more than the curious minds of individual teachers concerned with new pedagogical views; they make a very strong case towards curriculum redesign in order to foster and support the development of such competences - as the editors, Nicoletta Vasta and Anthony Baldry, argue in the introduction to the volume.

In the first chapter, Advances and Challenges in EFL Multiliteracy Environments, Nicoletta Vasta presents the context for the emergence of the MACHETE project (an acronym of Multiliteracy Advances and Challenges in Hypermedia English Teaching Environments) and thoroughly justifies the need for adapting instructional strategies to better match the modern learners needs for competence formation. From a pedagogical perspective, the project relies on the initiative of the New London Group, a set of scholars who coined the term multiliteracy in response to the increasing demand to re-design traditional literacy pedagogy, and who support the view that students need to be equipped to act as meaning makers in changing spaces and communities, able to cope with the diversity of communication channels and linguistic and cultural differences nowadays (Cope and Kalantzis 2000, 2009, 2015). Moreover, the chapter brings into discussion the focus on the need to develop such skills as echoed by multiple authors and documents including the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (DigCompEdu). Vasta also discusses here the theoretical framework underlying the concept of multimodality, which lies at the intersection of the Hallidayan systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA), of the applications of critical discourse analysis to multimodal studies (van Leeuwen 2008, OHalloran et al. 2017) and of multimodal analysis for critical thinking (OHalloran et al. 2017).

Vasta also proposes a model of instruction based on the processes for the extension of knowledge (formulated by Cope and Kalantzis 2009) to be used for the development of meaning-making practices, by progressing from an experiencing stage (exposure to different multimodal texts), through a conceptualising stage (introduction of students to O'Halloran et al. and their Multimodal Analysis Lab software) and an analysing stage (cluster analysis, visual-verbal relationship analysis, logo-genetic patterns, metasemiotic awareness of discontinuous meaningmaking paths), to finally reach the applying stage (where learners engage in collaborative tasks - like think aloud protocols, classroom discussions or collaborative content creation). The MACHETE project used a corpus of commercial and social advertising campaigns, from the US and the UK, paralleled by Italian advertisements, where possible, and selected on the basis of "whether and to what extent a given text features non-congruent verbal and/or visual realizations, culture-bound stereotypes and/or strong ideological bias - in short, whether it provides food for critical thought, preferably in an intercultural perspective" (p. 41).

The author further demonstrates how the analysis performed on different audio-visual resources can be carried out, highlighting important stages for the identification of community specific practices and their correspondence, or lack thereof, between the verbal and non-verbal elements, the exploration of crosscultural differences in a multimodal representation of a universal experience, the integration of logo-genetic pathways, cluster hopping or scaffolding procedures, as well as the analysis of specific discourse practices of certain communities. Another important aspect in the development of critical multiliteracies that Vasta addresses is the empowerment of students as meaning-making agents, who can identify and strip out hidden, stereotyped ideologies, power asymmetries, representations of marginalisation or conformity to skewed views (p. 60). The reader is presented with a very thorough account of the students' guided efforts to identify such enclosed meanings in two specific advertisements, by taking into account the themes and patterns in the textual narrative, by following a close comparison of verbal and nonverbal elements in order to reveal inconsistencies, such as an "ideological tension between denotation and connotation" (p. 56), reflected for example in stereotyped representations of two cultural systems, the encoding of power asymmetries and marginalisation in spite of an apparent 'caring' claim. Vasta concludes this first chapter with a powerful assertion that such critical multimodal multiliteracy classroom practices are to pave the way toward the construction of a pedagogy concerned with "the role of multimodal discourse in social practice and social change" (p. 60).

Chapter two, "Developing Critical Multimodal Literacy in Secondary School Students" by Piergiorgio Trevisan and chapter three, "Learners' Multisemiotic Competence and Questionnaires: Their text analysis role in the MACHETE project" by Nickolas Komninos continue to present details of the implementation of the MACHETE project, which enables the development of students' multi-literacies, essential for handling the decoding of different co-existing discourses, communication channels or modes of representation.

Trevisan details the importance of teaching students to carefully analyse visual and verbal congruence and incongruence, by using various meaning-making strategies and tools, while at the same time introducing students to the identification of ideological biases. The project extended over two months, during which a number of secondary school students moved from determining difficulties in dealing with multimodal texts, undergoing multimodal literacy training through the use of Multimodal Analysis Image© software, to finally producing their own alternative texts, which eliminated some of the discrepancies detected earlier. Trevisan clearly presents some of the meaning making activities students undertook, and proposes a particular multimodal toolkit - a set of specific questions for students to make use of along with the software, as they attempt to decode the various key elements and the overall textual organisation of an advertisement. Teachers are not only offered a detailed perspective of hands-on critical multimodal literacy development practices, but they are also able to reflect upon the proposed instructional stages suggested by the researchers (p. 80).

In chapter three, Komninos zooms in on the questionnaire used in the MACHETE project to determine students' ability to decode a multimodal advertising discourse, which later "led to the development of a skill-by-skill measurement tool" (p. 84), recording not just the initial state of the students' multisemiotic competence, but also reflecting the students' subsequent progress. A selection of questions and a limited number of student answers are presented in this chapter in more detail, in order to clarify the multifaceted tool used and the benefits of the superimposed analyses. Thus, the first question was helpful in the identification of the focal items in the advert, grouped by researchers into objects, processes, results, institutions and abstract properties, (the OPRIA analysis); the second question allowed for the identification of keywords and visual foci. The third question concentrated on the role of colours in social advertising and their interplay with other features in the construction of multimodal texts, while the last question looked at the relationship between image and words in visual texts at two distinct levels of analysis (a surface level - L1 and a deeper inference level - L2); this question also reflected how students link image and words (verbal linkage, noun linkage) in the overall interpretation of the multisemiotic text. The benefit of this questionnaire, both in the initial stage of the training, and as a monitoring tool, is evident in terms of the correct identification of barriers in meaning-making practice and of its possible replication in the classroom.

The chapter "Multimodal and Digital Literacies in the English Classroom: Interactive textbooks, open educational resources and a social platform" by Bessie Mitsikopoulou provides a detailed account of specific beneficial outcomes of the Digital School Projects, "two flagship nationwide projects" (p. 97), with significant roles to play in the integration of "digital technologies in Greek primary and secondary education" (ibid.), leading to the development of a national open access educational platform (containing interactive textbooks and national repositories) that assists both teachers and learners.

Starting with the development of interactive textbooks and the alignment of Open Educational Resources (OERs) with learning goals for each subject, and moving on to creating a whole database of OERs, the first project, Digital School I, has an impressive outcome: a set of more than 900 OERs, grouped together in repositories serving diverse functions (informative, instructional, experiential and exploratory) and providing digital content to be used as "digital enrichment" (p. 98) for several English-as-a-Foreign-Language textbooks for Gymnasium learners (grades 3-6).

The second project, Digital School II, produced a number of digital repositories which reflect Greece's focus on multimodal instruction and digital literacy development, in line with the new national Integrated Foreign Languages Curriculum of 2016. The purpose of the "Photodentro" repositories varies from collections to assist with digital education, learning objects, videos, user generated content, open educational practices, items of educational software to a thematic aggregator and the "e-me" educational social platform.

In this chapter, Mitsikopoulou illustrates the multitude of functions of the various products and the benefits of the wealth of tailored resources that are made available through the dschool.edu.gr portal, which bring about changes in the teaching landscape, by re-orienting it towards a combination of digital technologies and traditional resources to maximize learning outcomes.

The next chapter, "Developing Primary School Students' Multimodal Literacy in Digital Environments", by Styliani Karatza, brings into discussion the question of re-thinking curriculum design so that it better matches the nowadays' needs of students, who have to be able to read and interpret multimodal texts in digital contexts and ultimately produce such multimodal texts. Karatza thus discusses the need for students in the foreign language classroom to be taught multimodal literacy so that they "be adequately equipped to navigate the multimodal digital landscape" (p. 112) as early as primary school.

The author skilfully argues the case of multimodal digital literacy development (MDL) through multimodal discourse analysis practice (MDA) on digital texts with a theoretical grounding at the intersection of the "pedagogy of multiliteracies suggested by the New London Group (1996)", the framework of 'Learning by Design' (Cope and Kalantzis 2015) and the "Systemic Functional Approach to Teaching Multimodal Literacy" (Lim 2018) (p. 112-113). Under the teacher's supervision and guidance, the students are expected to move through four stages of MDA development, from situated practice and overt instruction to critical framing and transformed practice. Moreover, in this chapter, Karatza points out to the inseparable nature of language teaching and multimodal literacy, since communication in the foreign language presupposes making use of meaning making resources and strategies.

She carefully documents the case of using an MDL syllabus with a group of eighteen 11-year-olds, moving across eight multimodal teaching foci and the corresponding activities, from meaning-making resource use, visual analysis, consolidation, taking a closer look at the multimodal ensemble, to revising metalanguage and completing a multimodal artefact. Karatza also validates the positive outcomes of such an instructional model from the perspective of the students, measured through pre- and post-instruction questionnaires, which reflect the students' open attitudes towards an instructional design that is focused on multimodal literacy development in digital environments and the realisation of further benefits of a deeper understanding of a multimodal text.

The chapter "Multimodality of English as a School Subject: Mapping meanings about literacy discourses on students' work in a museum and school project" by Sophia Diamantopoulou brings into discussion an interesting view on the ways of understanding different literacy practices and literacy events occurring in two distinct settings, the school and the art museum, in view of enhancing the process of meaning-making. The students' output from the Tate Britain Ideas Factory project is closely analysed as a combination of literacy events and samples of discursive practices, which, from a multimodal literacy perspective, raise awareness both of the specificities of the contexts where they were produced and the otherwise unaccounted meanings enclosed.

The final chapter, "Multimodal Ecological Literacy: Animal and human interactions in the Animal Rescue genre", by Anthony Baldry and Paul J. Thibault, Francesca Coccetta, Deidre Kantz and Davide Taibi, is organised as a collection of five analyses of distinct digital texts, subtypes of the Animal Rescue genre [original emphasis], which take a frame by frame look at specific sequences and effects, at several multimodal meaning-making resources and the construction of multimodal corpora, all working toward the development of an ecological multimodal literacy.

Analysis A looks into the construction of some videos (news clips and documentaries) concerned with animal rescue, identifying and comparing their particular structures at four levels - microphasal, subphasal, macrophasal and metaphasal - with the help of the OpenMWS corpora analysis tools. Analysis B focuses on the "when not to intervene genre" and compares a mind map and a digital poster (both raising one's awareness of the importance of non-intervention in specific animal rescue situations) through cluster analysis, via the OpenMWS platform. Starting with a discussion of the structural particularities of a specific subgenre and its textual levels, the analysis also comments on the reading pathways (including cluster hopping) for multimodal texts, or recurrent lexico-grammatical structures, clearly illustrating the potential of this type of analysis to facilitate further multisemiotic text analysis and text selection for second language training. Analysis C is concerned with animal and human interaction occurring in Public Information Films and belonging to the subgenre of mistreated animals. The proposed key-frame analysis involves the identification of interaction types within the two specific macrophases - raising awareness about the moral obligation to intervene, and requesting support for the efforts of SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals). The SPCA advertisement videos examined here allowed for a specific multisemiotic analysis, with attention paid to their separate elements - oral discourse, sounds, written discourse and visual image, either considered separately or simultaneously. Analysis D proposes the simulation of a class project on the topic of animal rescue, using the OpenMWS interface and a proposed group study framework, which provides guidelines for a student-led selection of resources, annotation, creation of a searchable corpus, as well as for the comparative description of videos. The proposal of the authors is to consider the educational benefits of this type of distance learning pedagogical strategy for stimulating the students' curiosity and enabling their empowerment, which is seen to potentially expand to various situated learning practices among students from different countries. Finally, analysis E proposes a phasal analysis framework, intended to develop a multimodal ecological literacy, "which is sensitive to the necessarily semiotic character of the relations of community and reciprocity that define and sustain ecosystems" (p. 198).

Thus, this last chapter is a group effort of professors from different universities in Italy, Greece, and Norway to provide examples of frameworks and tools to analyse sequences of videos and page-based documents, digital texts, belonging to an online corpus, so as to serve as a potential investigative toolkit for teachers, students and researchers to interpret the animal rescue genre and eventually lead to the development of an ecological multimodal literacy.

To conclude, the different chapters in this volume present a kaleidoscope of applied instructional strategies concerned with the development of students' multiliteracies through critical multimodal analysis tools and digital technologies. The multiple research accounts highlight the educational value of implementing multimodal literacy practices in new interdisciplinary areas, while at the same time, they serve as instructional models that can be replicated and further developed to build a new pedagogical model, based on transformative English language teaching and learning practices.

Valentina Carina Mureşan is a Senior Lecturer at the West University of Timişoara, Romania. Her research interests and published papers have focused on various aspects of applied linguistics, language pedagogy, conversational analysis and translation studies, with a particular interest in communication and digital humanities.

E-mail address: [email protected]

References

References

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