Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Multimodal Literacy in Language Classrooms 341
hyperlinks, which when clicked on, can lead the reader to a visual presentation
of the multimedia text under discussion. For instance in both
Kramsch et al. (2000) and Nelson (2006) there are hyperlinks that connect
to specifi c student products under discussion.
Another challenge in this fi eld is training teachers to socialize children
into the ethics of multimedia usage. This includes sensitizing them to
inappropriate sites and content that may be harmful to diverse social
groups. There is also the issue of ownership of content and plagiarism
along with concerns regarding addiction to computer games. Current
teacher education programs tend not to emphasize these aspects of cyberlife
that are very important for adolescents.
As a fi eld which is barely a few decades old, we fi nd that there is
research required in many specifi c areas. For example, there is a dearth of
large-scale quantitative studies with a generalizable sample that can show
relationships between gender, race, social class and technology use in the
language classrooms. Arguably, there is also a need for studies with an
experimental design methodology, which reveal exactly the aspects of language
acquisition children learn with technology that those in a control
group do not. Finally there is a serious dearth of research on assessing
multimodal literacy. How exactly should a teacher grade a multimodal
text and how different is this form of assessment from that used with a
traditional text? In keeping with this is the issue of the misalignment
between use of technology in the classroom and standardized testing. In
most countries, standardized testing at the school level still does not use
computers extensively; thus teachers are reluctant to spend time incorporating
technology in the classroom as this might disenfranchise their
students in the exams.
Yet, more positively, a multimodal approach to literacy offers exciting
and productive prospects for sociolinguists and language teachers given
the affordances of new media and digital technologies, generally. Where
available, new media are challenging and changing canonical notions of
‘text’ and ‘reading behaviours’. The works of Jewitt (2002) and Unsworth
(2006) indicate that alternative presentations of material – those that go
well beyond the written word alone – expand interpretative resources
such as ‘character’ and ‘plot’ to the point that the construction of meaning
from a multimodal text requires the established customized or personalized
design-based purposes. Concomitantly, the proliferation of participatory
cultures (Jenkins et al., 2006) and purposeful acts of multimodal
redesigning (New London Group, 1996) portend even greater shifts of
authorial voice and distribution of agency to learners (see the examples of
zine and fanfi ction authorship above).
Fortunately, the pioneering theoretical work in multimodality and
multimodal literacy has assisted researchers and teachers in describing
sites of learning and subsequently understanding the genius involved in