Extending students’ semiotic understandings: Learning about and creating multimodal texts

Abstract

The texts of the twenty-first century employ a range of semiotic modes to convey their message. In order to work with these texts in classrooms, students need access to how meanings are created using the written, visual, and sound modes. Scaffolding of students learning to create multimodal texts begins with the teaching and learning of how a text is constructed. Deconstruction of the organisation of multimodal texts provides opportunities for the teaching of the grammars of written and visual texts, and the selection of relevant sound. This chapter explores how teachers scaffold students learning about multimodal texts in context in order to prepare them to create their own multimodal texts. It focuses on the teaching of the written and visual modes as separate entities and as a single unit of meaning. Selection of sound or audio to complement the written and visual modes is discussed. Students” final products provide evidence of their use of different semiotic modes to create a text that conveys their understandings within a content area. Data are drawn from work with students in four classes from an inner city primary year to school: year 3, year 3/4, year 4/5, and year 5 classes.