Katina Zammit

University of Western Sydn

Popular culture in the classroom: Interpreting and creating multimodal texts

The world for children in the 21st century is one that increasingly relies on the visual mode and the electronic medium (Kress, 1997). Interpreting multimodal texts, an developing a metalanguage to describe visual and verbal modes, needs to become part of the elementary literacy curriculum if we as educators are going to provide relevant and useful knowledge, skills, and understandings for our children. In this paper I will present a co-researched study conducted in a year 4 classroom ( 8-9 years old children) which involved the explicit teaching and learning of the construction of multimodal texts. A language to talk about the different multimodal genres contained in children's popular culture texts, eg. K-Zone and Disney Adventures was introduced to students as a means to talk about and critique the construction of the multimodal, visual and written texts (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996; Martin, 1992). The students employed this knowledge in the creation of their own multimodal texts, using digital and computer technology. Emphasis during the study was placed on developing students' meta-language and investigating the use of the genre-based teaching/learning cycle, in particular the methods of scaffolding students' understandings of visual, written and multimodal texts in paper-based and the electronic mediums.

References:

Kress, G. (1997). Visual and verbal modes of representation in electronically mediated communication: the potentials of new forms of text. In I. Snyder (Ed.), Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era (pp. 53-79). Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge Press.

Martin, J. R. (1992). English text : system and structure. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Co.