Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

330 Part 4: Language and Literacy
multimodal texts. As far as pedagogical practices are concerned, contemporary
conceptualizations of literacy challenge long-accepted notions of
what knowledge is, where it is created and the purposes for which it is
used. Arguably, the overriding goal for multimodal literacy as a branch of
knowledge and inquiry is to understand how the complexities of communication
in the digital era can be dealt with in productive, socially just and
equitable ways.
Multimodal Literacy Practices, Language Classrooms
and Teacher Education
Research fi ndings in the area of multimodal literacy in language classrooms
can be broadly classifi ed into two strands: multimodal literacy
practices outside the classroom though with implications for in class literacy,
and multimodal literacy practices situated specifi cally in the language
classroom. Both these strands have enormous implications for
teacher education, which we have included under a separate heading.
Multimodal literacy practices out of school
Chandler-Olcott and Mahar (2003) and Black (2005) use ‘Multiliteracies’
as a theoretical framework to explore the way adolescents use literacy
outside the classroom. Chandler-Olcott and Mahar (2003) focus on the
anime art literacy practices of two adolescent girls. Anime refers to
animated fi lms and television series originating in Japan. One of their
case-study subjects, Rhiannon, was very involved in writing fanfi ction,
that is episodic stories using characters and settings from favorite anime
cartoons and video games. The authors comment that Rhiannon’s teachers
in school were not aware that she wrote lengthy fanfi ction stories
because ‘from a multiliteracies perspective, technology integration in her
school placed far more emphasis on elements of linguistic design, than on
visual, spatial, or audio modes’ (Chandler-Olcott & Mahar, 2003: 372).
Also, though her teachers perceived Rhiannon as a passive learner, the
authors found that she was very pro-active on the computer and actively
sought help to improve her skills in web page construction. The other
case-study subject in this paper, Eileen, was very skillful in taking any
drawing and ‘animefying’ it. The authors found that Eileen had become
an accomplished designer of anime-related multimodal texts by joining a
virtual community of people who were also interested in anime art. Along
with learning new ways to create texts the two girls in this study were
also using online communities to create more satisfying social lives than
they had in real time.
Chandler-Olcott and Mahar (2003) conclude that teachers must take
note of what their students are doing in terms of literacy practices outside