Exploring a 'good enough' description of image-language interaction for multimodal comprehension and composition pedagogy

Abstract

One of the key intentions of the new Australian national English curriculum is to '... develop students' understanding about how the English language works', progress this in a 'coherent and cumulative' way and promote 'learning that is portable and applicable to new settings across the school years and beyond' (Commonwealth of Australia, 2009, p. 6). The issue of what kind of knowledge about language (KAL) is 'good enough' (Macken-Horarik, Love et al. 2011) to enable teachers and students to achieve this and to interpret and compose 'an increasingly broad repertoire of spoken, written and multimodal texts'(Commonwealth of Australia, 2009, p. 5), necessarily extends to how KAL articulates with knowledge about the meaning-making resources of images and image-language interaction. This session explores relationships among the visual and verbal construction of the interpersonal and evaluative dimensions of narrative, including point of view and reader/viewer positioning in relation to the representation of the interior and exterior experience of characters. It draws on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) related research on image-language interaction (Painter and Martin in press), student multimodal reading comprehension (Unsworth and Chan 2008; 2009) and multimodal composition using paper media (Macken-Horarik and Adoniou 2008) and digital multimedia (Burn and Durran 2006; Thomas 2008; O'Brien et. al. 2010). Analyses of literary picture books, illustrated narratives and animated film, are used to discuss approaches to formulating a pedagogically practical and theoretically coherent meta-semiotic toolkit that will enable teachers and students to optimize the development of their enjoyment, critical interpretation and authoring of established and new forms of multimodal narratives.