Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Multimodal Literacy in Language Classrooms 323
what it has been repeatedly used to mean and do, and the social conventions
that inform its use in a particular context, all serve to shape its
affordance. For example, that which can be drawn may not be done
equally, or is done differently, in writing and vice versa. Furthermore,
and crucially, the logic and affordances of modes entail users making
certain claims about knowledge whether they realize it or not.
Substantiating this point, Kress notes in the domain of science:
If I say, ‘a plant cell has a nucleus’, I have been forced by the mode to
provide a name for the relationship between the cell and the nucleus.
I have named it as a relation of possession, ‘have’. If I draw the cell,
and have been asked to indicate the nucleus, my drawing requires me
to place the element that indicates the nucleus somewhere; I cannot
avoid that epistemological commitment. (Kress, 2003: 57)
By implication, and generally, multimodal representations of knowledge
are realized by the user’s design decisions, which are inherently
epistemological in nature. Therefore, Kress (2003: 37) points out to educators,
in particular, that ‘[i]t is no longer responsible to let children experience
school without . . . an understanding of the shift from competent
performance to design as the foundational fact of contemporary social and
economic life’.
Competent performance with multimodality is further informed by a
conceptual distinction made by Lemke (1998: 290) between two matching
ways in which meanings are made. First, with ‘typological’ meaning, language
is used to express differences in kind through discrete contrastive
categories; for example, up from down or male from female and so on.
Second, topological meaning is concerned more with how things appear
or sound. The pedagogical importance of understanding the differences
between, and the combination of, typological and topological meaningmaking
is illustrated with the use of electronic slideshow software by
teachers. Undoubtedly, the tools and editing functions in popular offi ce
suites assist in composition and presentation. The production of slides
also forces and foregrounds decision making relating to the amalgamation
of words, images and sounds to achieve specifi c communicative purposes.
For example, Figure 12.1 is a prototype of slide designed to assist in the
teaching of the comparative adjectives, ‘bigger’ and ‘smaller’. This text
exaggerates a contrastive relationship through the purposeful resizing
and positioning of photographs and typesetting – the choice of typeface,
point size and kerning (the relative spacing between letters and characters).
Thus, the dimensions of the photograph of the elephant are greater
than those of the fi eld mouse. The elephant is also placed above its counterpart
to signify prominence (in the animal kingdom) in terms of stature,
weight and strength. Similarly, the words ‘bigger’ and ‘smaller’ look
markedly different. The word ‘bigger’ appears in a larger, bold font and is