Towards a metalanguage for multiliteracies education: Describing the meaning-making resources of language-image interaction

Title
Towards a metalanguage for multiliteracies education: Describing the meaning-making resources of language-image interaction
Publication Date
2006
Author(s)
Unsworth, Len
Type of document
Journal Article
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
University of Waikato
Place of publication
New Zealand
UNE publication id
une:2202
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 resources for 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 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.
Link
Citation
English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 5(1), p. 55-76
ISSN
1175-8708
Start page
55
End page
76

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