Designs for Multimodality in Literacy Studies: Explorations in Analysis (original) (raw)

Literacy studies have taken a semiotic turn. We read the recent torrent of publications on multimodality in literacy studies as a sign of dissatisfaction with verbocentric theories of 'text' and 'literacy,' and a desire to acknowledge the permeable boundaries among sign systems in the contemporary semiotic landscape. This emerging field of scholarship has not settled on a single definition, theory, or set of analytic tools, even if some approaches have nearly become synonymous with 'multimodality.' The unsettled status of the field appears to be a productive moment of experimentation, invention, and problem-posing as researchers design analytic approaches that draw on a range of theoretical frameworks relevant to their research interests, purposes, and questions (e.g.This theory provides a metalanguage that calls attention to the multiple modes of representation available and their affordances, as well as the way a sign-maker's interests shape the choice of mode, and, consequently, the production of meanings. Without this metalanguage, modes might be (and often are) taken as "natural" and the sign-maker's interests ignored. Yet, we believe this approach is, by itself, not enough to understand multimodality, and propose that analyzing multimodality requires a hybrid approach-a blend or "mash-up" of theories. Although a researcher might elect to focus primarily on the way an individual's interests and choice of modes shapes meaning-making, to do so in the absence of historical, cultural, and political theories of literacy curriculum, teaching, and learning is to limit what a multimodal lens can offer educators. In what follows, we trace the history of attention to multimodality in literacy studies as a prelude to our own experiment with blending different theoretic lenses to read a classroom literacy event from an early study of transmediation . We conclude by posing some of the questions that challenge researchers as they pursue the analysis of multimodality.