Plenary Speaker: Gunther Kress

Title: 'Writing' or 'Text': thinking around 'Literacy' in the landscape of
contemporary representation and communication

Issues that are bothersome in current thinking around 'Literacy' range
from the uses and meanings of the term 'Literacy' - as has been
mentioned many times, it is a term that is specific to English, and in
English usages can have any number of meanings - to questions about
the use of the term 'text' - is 'text' a term that should be confined
to linguistically instantiated message-entities or not? There is also
the issue as to what, if anything, might be the difference between
Language and Literacy, when the latter seems so often to be used to
encompass all of the meanings of the former. In this talk, I will deal
with these issues from the perspective of a (social) semiotic approach
to multimodality; and locate the topic in the essential context of the
effects of the technologies of dissemination - the so-called 'New
Media'- on resources and forms of representation.