Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

318 Part 4: Language and Literacy
skills, the school system in India does not. Having said this about
Singapore, this chapter will show that mere access is a necessary but not
suffi cient condition for teachers to teach multimodal literacy.
One of the key issues regarding new literacy practices is whether or not
and how they should be integrated into the language classroom so as to
enhance the learning experiences of students. An equally important issue
is that of equitable access to technology. Yet another issue relates to what
Leander and Lewis (2008) call sociality, which refers to issues of identity
and group membership in CMC. Finally there are issues of measuring
how literacy has been enhanced or altered, and exactly which aspects of
language and literacy acquisition have been enhanced or altered, through
the use of technology.
This chapter explores these and related issues through the lens of multimodal
literacy. At the outset we would like to situate our subject in the
discipline of sociolinguistics. Janks (this volume) writes that a socio-
cultural approach to language education refers variously to critical literacy,
critical language awareness, critical applied linguistics, New Literacy
Studies and multimodal literacies or multiliteracies. She traces the fi eld of
‘critical literacy’ as theorized practice via four points in time: critical literacy,
critical linguistics, multiliteracies, and literacy and space. Finally, she
indicates that multiliteracies is an approach to literacy studies, which
includes the re-examination of meaning-making in an age where visual
modes of representation are in the ascendancy. This chapter is consistent
with Janks’s overviews of multiliteracies and multimodal literacy as
approaches pertinent to the fi eld of critical literacy.
We begin with a section that defi nes the terminology currently used in
our adopted approaches. Thereafter, we look at what might be considered
the main goals of multimodal literacy and report research fi ndings in a
review of literature on multimodal literacy practices, language classrooms,
and teacher education. As part of the research fi ndings, we focus on the
Technology in English (TIE) project, which was completed by the Learning
Sciences Laboratory at Singapore’s National Institute of Education in
February 2009. We use preliminary fi ndings from this project to explore
links between research and practice in the language classroom. Finally, we
conclude the chapter with a look at under-researched topics in this fi eld,
which need more attention not only from the international academic community
but also from teachers who face challenges posed by technology in
their daily teaching and policy makers who want national school systems
to be highly wired.
Defi nition of Key Terms
In this section we describe the way scholars refer to technology, multimodality
and multiliteracies and other related terms.