English Teaching: Practice and Critique
Towards a metalanguage for multiliteracies education: Describing the meaning - making resources of language-image interaction
Len Unsworth (School of Education, University of New England)
The increasingly integrative use of images with
language in many different types of texts 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 text
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. However, current research indicates that articulating
discrete visual and verbal grammars is not sufficient to account for
meanings made at the intersection of language and image. This
paper adopts a systemic functional semiotic perspective in outlining a
range of different types of such meanings in different kinds of texts,
suggesting the significance of such meanings in comprehending and
composing contemporary multimodal texts, and the importance of
developing an appropriate metalanguage to enable explicit discussion of
these meaning-making resources by teachers and students.