New Literacies and the English Curriculum

Len Unsworth, Len Unsworth

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441135797
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistic Semantics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In an age where the use of electronic media is expanding and the nature of traditional texts and text-based learning is changing, new literacies are becoming increasingly importantin the school classroom. This volume examines how new literacies can be used in the English curriculum, andpresents a series of research-basedstudies applied to every level ofschool-age education. Thechapters examine: early literacy; picture books; the internet; secondary school English; and the problems of assessment in the new literacy age. Thisforward-thinking volume will be of interest to teachers andacademics researchingeducation, literacy, applied linguistics, and socialsemiotic theory.

Part 1

Introduction

Chapter 1
Negotiating New Literacies in English Teaching

Len Unsworth
University of New England

Introduction

On the face of it there seems to be evidence that New Literacies are firmly a part of the English curriculum from kindergarten to matriculation in most English-speaking countries. There seems to be broad agreement that literacy can no longer be thought of as involving language alone and that images, in paper media texts, and also sound, movement and gesture in digital multimedia texts, need to be considered along with language as fundamental meaning-making resources in constructing text. The role of information and communication technology (ICT) in mediating a range of new types of text seems also to be widely accepted as an integral aspect of the English classroom. Formally, New Literacies are an explicit part of government-mandated school syllabi and curriculum documents in Australia and in the National Curriculum for England (Unsworth, in press; Macken-Horarik, this volume). There are issues as to the extent of implementation of such New Literacies aspects of curricula in some schools because of concerns about access of some schools in the lower socio-economic areas to the same level of technology as their more affluent counterparts, and also because of the generational digital divide, which necessitates some, usually but not exclusively, older teachers acquiring professional skills in the use of contemporary ICT and associated commonly used software. But in addition to these issues there are significant ways in which the reconceptualization of literacy and literacy pedagogy that is an essential concomitant of the digital multimedia age, presents very significant challenges in terms of its semiotic theorization and pedagogic practice. Fundamental to these challenges is the necessarily iterative nature of this reconceptualization process. Kress (2000a, p. 155) has argued that ‘semiotic theory which does not have an account of change at its core is both simply inadequate and implausible in the present period’. The importance of this ‘deictic’ nature of New Literacies has similarly been emphasized by Leu (2004) and his colleagues, who drew attention to three main sources of the ongoing emergence of New Literacies:

• Transformations of literacy because of technological change

• Envisionments of new literacy potentials within new technologies

• The use of increasingly efficient technologies of communication that rapidly spread new literacies.

Leu and his colleagues further emphasized that

[a]s literacy increasingly becomes deictic, the changing constructions of literacy within new technologies will require all of us to keep up with these changes and to prepare students for a vastly different conception of what it means to become literate.

(Leu et al., 2004, p. 1591)

In the face of such very significant challenges to teachers and teacher educators, a viable framework is needed that addresses the integration of constantly evolving New Literacies into educational practice. Such a framework could be derived from a proposal for a developmental perspective on how teachers might conceptualize and implement new digital technologies in their work, which adapted the concepts of assimilation and accommodation from Piaget’s classical developmental theory of learning (Reinking et al., 2000). From this perspective New Literacies are assimilated into literacy pedagogy and research when they are conceptualized in relation to conventional literacy, and implemented in conformity with existing curricula and pedagogic practice. Accommodation implies that the understandings and experiences of New Literacies have led to a fundamental restructuring of thinking involving a preparedness to entertain the idea that the very nature of literacy may well be changing. It means understanding that these New Literacies need to be negotiated in their own terms rather than being seen as extensions of established literacies (Lemke, 1998; Leu & Kinzer, 2000). Reinking et al. (2000) point out that accommodation does not mean abandoning research on ways in which electronic texts interface with conventional literacy practices. What is suggested here is that assimilation and accommodation will be required as complementary and iterative processes as school systems negotiate the ongoing emergence of New Literacies. The subsequent chapters deal with aspects of professional learning that will facilitate teachers’ productive entry into and participation in this dynamic. One key aspect is the understanding that new literacies do not simply entail alternative ways of making meaning (assimilation) but also new systems of meaning potential (accommodation). Although the ongoing reconceptualization of literacy will ultimately need to involve the discrete and integrative roles of a range of semiotic systems, this volume will focus mainly on the impact of the increased and changing role of images and image/language interaction. In this chapter the background for this focus will be briefly outlined and some of the implications of reconceptualizing literacy in the light of the changing nature of image/language interaction will be introduced.

Beyond Logocentric Models of Literacy: Addressing the Role of Images in Texts

It is now a very routine matter for most personal computer users to be able to integrate images with language in the digital texts they compose and then share via electronic or paper media. This presents obvious challenges to logocentric theories of literacy and the traditional primacy of language in texts (Warshauer, 1999). It has been argued that written elements on screen are now considered to be only what cannot be done in images (Boulter, 1999) and that

Literacy in electronic environments may have more to do with the production and consumption of images than reading and writing of either hypertextual or linear prose.

(Bolter, 1998, p. 7)

The role of images relative to print in the communication of meanings in paper media is assuming greater prominence in texts of popular culture and professional, civic and social life and in school curriculum and educational materials more generally. While most contemporary novels tend to remain ‘pictureless’, there appear to be a growing number of popular exceptions such as Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Fable The Last Hero illustrated by Paul Kidby (Pratchett & Kidby, 2001), the edition of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings illustrated by Alan Lee (Tolkien & Lee, 2002), and the illustrated version of The Da Vinci Code (Brown, 2004), as well as illustrated novels for young readers such as Isobelle Carmody’s Dreamwalker, illustrated by Steve Woolman (Carmody & Woolman, 2001). There is also the enduring popularity of comics and graphic novels (McCloud, 2000; Saraceni, 2003) including the recontextualization of long-established literary works, such as Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (Kafka, 1915/2004) in this form (Kuper, 2003). In the case of picture storybooks the nature and the role of images have undergone major changes with the advent of the postmodern picture book (Dresang, 1999; Dresang & McClelland, 1999; Hollindale, 1995; Lewis, 2001; Lonsdale, 1993; Prain, 1998; Stephens & Watson, 1994; Watson, 1997).

The increasing frequency and prominence of images in newspapers and in school science textbooks has been demonstrated by Kress and van Leeuwen (Kress, 1997; Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996; Kress & van Leeuwen, 1995). Kress has also argued that the contemporary integrative use of the visual and the verbal has produced a new code of writing and image, in which information is carried differentially by the two modes (Kress, 1997, 2003). Information that displays what the world is like is carried by the image, consistent with the logic of the visual as arrangement and display. Written language on the other hand, tends to follow the logic of speech in being oriented to action and event, and is thus oriented to the recording/reporting of actions and events and the ordering of procedures.

While the necessity of rethinking the relative roles of images and language in literacy theory and practices may have been prompted by the impact of ICT (Richards, 2001), it is not simply an artefact of electronic media but applies equally to the use of contemporary texts in paper media (Henderson, 1999; Royce, 1998; Russell, 2000). In fact Kress has argued that it

…is now impossible to make sense of texts, even their linguistic parts alone, without having a clear idea of what these other features might be contributing to the meaning of a text.

(Kress, 2000b, p. 337)

This need to redefine literacy and literacy pedagogy in the light of the increasing influence of images has been widely advocated in the international literature (Russell, 2000). The Handbook of Reading Research, noted as ‘particularly important’ that research be undertaken ‘in the comprehension of graphics and text and the study of whether (and how) referential connections between visuals and text can be explicitly taught’ (Kamil et al., 2000). Writing about Books for Youth in a Digital Age, Dresang (1999) noted that

[i]n the graphically oriented, digital, multimedia world, the distinction between pictures and words has become less and less certain.

(1999, p. 21)

and that

[i]n order to understand the role of print in the digital age, it is essential to have a solid grasp of the growing integrative relationship of print and graphics.

(1999, p. 22)

In both electronic and paper media environments then,

[a]lthough the fundamental principles of reading and writing have not changed, the process has shifted from the serial cognitive processing of linear print text to parallel processing of multimodal text-image information.

(Luke, 2003, p. 399)

Lemke (2006, p. 11) has emphasized the importance of understanding the meaning-making practices people employ in complex virtual environments including ‘how linguistic and visual-graphic meaning-making are integrated.’ Andrews (2004) has explicitly noted the importance of the visual/verbal interface in both computer and hard copy texts:

… it is the visual/verbal interface that is at the heart of literacy learning and development for both computer-users and those without access to computers.

(Andrews, 2004, p. 63)

Resourcing Assimilation and Accommodation of New Literacies intheEnglish Curriculum

The motif of reconceptualizing literacy in terms of image/language interaction permeates most of this volume linking fundamental arenas of change that need to be negotiated in the iterative processes of assimilation and accommodation of New Literacies. These change arenas are reflected in the structure of the book. First, it is important that the English curriculum is considered in terms of a continuum from the beginnings of schooling to matriculation. In the first two chapters Peter Freebody and Bette Zhang Bin and Jane Torr are concerned with the role of image/language interaction in early literacy pedagogy. Freebody and Zhang Bin emphasize that early reading materials are not simply ideologically inert resources for developing literacy skills but that they simultaneously construct for children ways in which experience is ‘read-able’ in certain ways. Hence they argue that ‘a semiotic inquiry into the properties of texts aimed at informing practical pedagogy needs to begin with mutually informing examination of both texts and pedagogies’. Pedagogic practice needs to be considered in relation to the fact that images, particularly in early reading materials, are designed to obviate the need for analytic, interpretive work on language, so that what is communicated is represented unproblematically ‘as windows onto reality rather than crafted communications with histories of interpretation’. Torr examines in detail the interaction of young children with their preschool teachers and mothers in reading images in picture books. Of particular interest is the discrepancy between adult and child interpretations of pictures, how this is resolved, and what principles children develop for the interpretation of such images and their relation to the language of the stories. These chapters draw attention to the significance of text/context relations and the nature of pedagogic interaction in the ontogenesis of new literacies practices.

While there has been a very long tradition of scholarship in formulating various ‘grammars’ and discourse systems to describe the meaning-making resources of language, which have then been available for pedagogic purposes, there has been no comparable tradition in formulating analogous ‘grammatical’ descriptions of the meaningmaking resources of images. However, the development of such a grammar was clearly considered desirable by established scholars of literature for children (Nodelman, 1988:ix), and the need for a metalanguage that included the meaning-making resources of images has been recently emphasized in the light of the increasingly multimodal nature of texts (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000). Initial work towards a ‘grammar of visual design’ (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), extrapolated from systemic functional linguistic theory (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004), provided a substantial basis for further work in this area, but Kress and van Leeuwen (2006: Preface) have maintained that their work in this field remains in its infancy. The section of this volume dealing with ‘[i]nterpreting literary picture books’ introduces new theoretical descriptions of the meaning-making resources of images and implications for the pedagogic use of such descriptions. In Chapter 4 John Stephens examines the use of language and image in the construction of discourses of environment and ecology in literary materials for children, further emphasizing the ‘constructedness’ of perspectives on experience in such materials as introduced by Freebody and Zhang Bin in Chapter 2. Stephens argues that the multimodal resources are marshalled to construct ‘pro-environmental’ stances in which humans are constructed as ‘outside’ of nature with nature being invested with value through the perceptions and caring of humans about it, and hence the texts are ‘anthropocentrically focused on the expression, evaluation and transformation of the self’. In Chapter 5 Clare Painter extends Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) work on a grammar of visual design, focussing on the construction of ambience in children’s picture books, principally through the use of colour in images. Ambience involves the creation or evocation of an atmosphere to which the viewer responds emotionally. A proposed visual system of AMBIENCE is presented, with each different option from the system explained and exemplified in relation to well-known picture books. This system of ambience is used in Chapter 6 in which Jim Martin explores the ways in which appraisal resources of image and language are mobilized in constructing the discourse of reconciliation in the children’s picture book Photographs in the Mud (Wolfer & Harrison-Lever, 2005), which deals with Australian-Japanese warfare on the Kokoda Trail in New Guinea in World War II. The systems of Appraisal (Hunston & Thompson, 2000; Martin & Rose, 2003) describe the meaning-making options within language for constructing evaluative stance. In Chapter 6 Jim Martin explores the construction of appraisal in images in his analys is of Photographs in the Mud (Wolfer & Harrison-Lever, 2005) and in Chapter 7 Corinne Buckland and Andrew Simpson also use appraisal theory in exploring the ways images and language are deployed in the representation of values in Little Black Sambo (Bannerman, 1976/1899) as originally published and in a contemporary recontextualization (Bannerman & Bing, 2003). The New London Group (2000) proposed that the multiliteracies pedagogy required for contemporary and future schooling needed to be able to use

… a metalanguage that describes meaning in various realms. These include the textual, the visual, as well as the multimodal relations between different meaning-making processes that are now so critical in media texts and the texts of electronic multimedia.

(New London Group, 2000, p. 24)

The authors emphasized that teachers and students need this kind of metalanguage for talking about language, images and sound etc. and their meaning-making interactions. It is a significant (but not sufficient) resource for developing students’ understanding of how the ‘interestedness’ of all texts is frequently ‘naturalized’ or deemed invisible by the semiotic choices that are made in constructing the text. This kind of metalanguage gives stud...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Preface
• Part 1 Introduction
• Part 2 Multimodality in Early Literacy Learning
• Part 3 Interpreting Literary Picture Books: Social Semiotic Perspectives
• Part 4 New English and Net-Age Students in the Middle Years
• Part 5 Re-Thinking Text Responses in Secondary School English
• Part 6 Challenges of Assessment in the English Curriculum
• APPENDIX 1 Performance Terrain in Shaping Online Multimodal Texts
• Index