Describing meaning-making at the intersection of language and image: Towards a metalanguage for multi-modal literacy pedagogy

Abstract

The increasingly integrative use of images with language in many different types of teas 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 tea 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 (1996) However, current research indicates that articulating discrete visual and verbal grammars does not account for meanings made at the intersection of language and image. This session will outline a range of different types of such meanings in different kinds of electronic and paper media teas, drawing attention to the significance of such meanings in comprehending and composing contemporary multimodal teas.