The Written Word is Not Enough! Harnessing Adolescents' Multimodal Literacy Practices in the ELA Classroom

Abstract

Today's world presents English educators with an interesting intersection of technology and literacy that has the potential to inform and transform our classroom practice. Consider this: In today's world, a literate person must be able to read and create a range of paper based and online texts (newspapers, pamphlets, websites, books, Kindle, and so on), participate in and create virtual settings (classrooms, Second Life, Facebook, Elluminate, blogs, wikis) that use interactive and dynamic Web 2.0 tools and critically analyze multimodal texts that integrate visual, musical, dramatic, digital, and new literacies. (Albers, 2007; Doering, Beach, & O'Brien, 2007; Harste, Leland, Grant, Chung, & Enyeart, 2007; Miller 2007). Within this increasingly socially networked and textually mediated world of cultural differences and rapidly changing communication media, we are reminded constantly of the changing nature of literacy pedagogy and our meanings for literacy. As multimodal practices become intrinsic to our literacy practices, the function of traditional literacy pedagogy focused merely on language alone is seemingly being eclipsed by multiliteracies and multimodalities, inherent modes of representation that are much broader than language only, and differ according to culture and context, and specific cognitive, cultural and social effects (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000).