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A brief guide to some jargon

Ben Williamson, Futurelab

Some academic research seems to be written in language that is specifically designed to prevent it being read. What is more, this linguistic camouflage sometimes seems to masquerade for concepts that are even harder to comprehend. This article aims to reveal the meaning behind some words that have recently become popular in the educational research literature: 'multimodality', 'multisemiotics' and 'multiliteracies'.

These words are often used in misleadingly complicated ways, and can be perceived as being difficult terms, with that prefix 'multi-' suggesting all kinds of meanings. And this is perhaps the point: accounts of multimodality, multisemiotics and multiliteracies emphasise the many ways and contexts in which people experience communication and come to develop understandings.

Additionally, multimodality and the others may be newly-coined words, apparently new theories, but they do not explicitly describe new phenomena. For instance, the everyday experiences of every individual are multimodal: we see, we hear, we touch, we smell, and we taste. Our experience of the world comes to us through the multiple modes of communication to which each of our senses is attuned.

Multisemiotics, similarly, describes the multiple meanings that are offered by these modes, and thus the multiple possible understandings that we might be able to make from them. The meanings that we construe from particular moments of multimodal communication are inextricably linked to our previous experiences, personal histories, our cultures, communities, and identities as individuals. The idea that there is one standard set of meanings for all is no longer considered true. Rather, the available meanings taken from any instance of communication are potentially multiple, or multisemiotic.

If none of this is new, then, why the long tongue-twisting words? In short, because we are beginning to witness a shift away from the written and spoken word as the dominant means of communication, and increasingly seeing diverse visual and aural forms of public communication such as film, music, multimedia, the internet, and computer games gain in popularity and cultural importance.

When people talk of multiliteracies, what they mean is the ability to read all of these media and the modes made available by them, and eventually to produce through them too. Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis[1] provide good examples including 'reading' websites or interactive multimedia. It is clear that traditional literacy practices alone (being able to read and produce printed text) are insufficient for this age of multimedia[2].

Further, interests in multimodality in education have been generated by the increasing use of multimedia in the classroom, from image manipulation software to electronic music-making packages, to science simulations, and to virtual theatres that exist on computers.

While multimodality is not exclusively new, then, it is clearly important for us to be able to accurately describe the altered landscape of communication that young people are growing up in. Likewise, their experiences of learning will be increasingly visual, aural and interactive, not simply because they will have better access to computers, but because teachers no longer simply speak at children, and children no longer simply read texts and write down responses.

Multimodality and multisemiotics are attempts to theorise these multiple forms of communication, identifying how multiple modes such as images, words, and actions all depend on each other to create whole meanings. A very good example of this is provided in Kress et al's Multimodal Teaching and Learning: The Rhetorics of the Science Classroom[3]. They analyse a short sequence of actions in a science classroom as a teacher attempts to describe the workings of the human heart. Variously, the teacher uses spoken words, a freehand line diagram drawn on a whiteboard, a rubber model of a heart, a textbook illustration, and his hands to communicate with his class.

Importantly, what the authors point out is that at times each individual mode depends on other modes to complete the communicative act. Without spoken words, the diagram would not make sense; without the model heart, the rhythmic gesture of the hand would not make sense, and so on. Each mode, then, as a semiotic resource, contributes to the meaning being made. It is then the task of the child involved in learning to transform the teacher's repertoire of modes and semiotic resources into understandings.

This, according to researchers operating in this area, is achieved through a process of 'design'. In the New London Group's well-known paper on multiliteracies[4], it is suggested that any moment of meaning-making is essentially an act of design. They outline the process of design in three parts.

First, in any act of communication we are able to draw on 'available designs', certain resources and conventions such as forms of discourse, genres, and dialects.

The second part of the process is 'designing', which involves the transformation of these resources into one's own voice, and making new use of old materials. According to this, reading and listening, as well as writing and speaking, are instances of designing, since we each make use of available designs to produce meaning, transforming what we have read or heard into meanings according to our interests and personal histories.

The third and final part of the process is the production of 'the redesigned', the resource that has been produced by designing, or a meaning that has been remade, and which in turn becomes a new available design, a new resource with potential for meaning-making.

The idea of design, then, is not only to be applied to creative activities, but should be seen as a core part of everyday experience, and therefore an important element to emphasise in education. The multiliteracies argument suggests that when we are educating young people to become competent and engaged learners, we need to ensure they can identify how meanings are always related to culture, how they have been designed, and how that might affect what we think of them.

The terms multimodality, multisemiotics and multiliteracies, then, are attempts to account for the diversity in communications that are encountered in everyday life, and how these affect what we make of them. In explicitly educational settings, what is important is promoting children's recognition that all forms of communication, including spoken and written words, images, actions, sounds and so on, are related to particular designs of meaning, from diverse cultures, contexts, and historical periods.

It is important, firstly, so that young people can become responsible producers of meaning, able to identify and make use of the variety of modes of communication that will be required of them throughout their lives; and secondly, so that they are adequately equipped to be able to identify how they, as citizens, are influenced by the communicative practices which surround them on a daily basis. Without educating young people to develop these understandings, according to this school of thought, they will be unable to constructively critique anything they have learned, unable to account for its cultural location, or creatively extend or apply it; they will only grow into unquestioning adults incapable of innovation.

Further reading

Stuart Hall (ed) (1997). Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage Publications

Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (1996). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge

Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (2001). Multimodal Discourse. London: Edward Arnold

Colin Lankshear (1997). Changing Literacies. Buckingham: Open University Press