Janet Jones

Learning Centre and Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney

Multiliteracies for academic purposes: multimodality in textbook and computer-based learning materials in science at university

In universities today, information and communication technologies (ICT) are changing the terrain of literacy and pedagogical practices in the disciplines. Much of the current teaching and research in ICT, however, has tended to focus on the innovation of technology-driven approaches rather than on understanding the kinds of literacies students need in the new learning environments. The broader and pluralised concept of literacy - that of multiliteracies – recognises the need to redefine literacy for multimodal, hypertextual and multimedia environments.

This paper will report on a study which aims to provide an account of multimodal meaning-making resources in learning materials in science at university. The concept of multimodality is taken to mean the diverse ways in which a number of distinct semiotic resource systems are both co-deployed and co-contextualised in meaning making. Social semiotic theoretical accounts of the concept, largely inspired by Systemic Functional Linguistics, which re-theorise the notion of ‘text’, are of central importance for this research. The paper will discuss the results of Stage 1 of the study, a multimodal content analysis of a corpus of textbook and computer-based learning materials currently used in undergraduate science courses at the University of Sydney. Preliminary results of Stage 2, the SFL analysis of the corpus, will be also be presented, along with a discussion of the major theoretical challenges posed by the research. Finally, the implications of the study for developing students’ multiliteracies for academic purposes will be considered.