Multimodality

Burn and Parker ( 2001) showed how 6th grade primary school children in England learned to use film grammar while changing a story into an animation. In this process, children needed to consider how space and time is designed, and how their audience responds to their animation. While participating in the process of making an animation, children created individual images, combined them to make the moving image sequence, and modified or edited images, and collaborated and competed with one another to get information helpful for their production of animation.

In the meantime, the interior design described in Smagorinsky, Zoss, and Reed’s article was also involving similar processes. By focusing on a focal student in a the interior design class of a high school, Smagorinsky et al. addressed how the focal student, Dee adopted design conventions, integrated her experiences and common sense into her design, set up goals, and utilized problem-solving strategies suggested by her teacher.

The composition project described in Shipka’s article was brilliant. Students in this article chose their topic for their composition and drew several modes. The students established the goals for their project, modified their goals, considered their reasons why they utilized certain modes for their composing project.

Even though the activities described in these three articles were involving different modes and purposes, it was interesting to see how three different composing activities described in three articles (Burn and Parker, 2001; Shipka, 2006; Smagorinsky et. al, 2006) were similar in terms of processes. Considering the processes of these compositing activities, I began to wonder how these multimodal composing can be applied to literacy classes. It might not always be possible to use new technologies in schools like those in Burn and Parker’s article due to several administrative reasons, standardized test, and lack of technological facilities. In addition, not all of the students in secondary and primary schools are familiar with technological tools. It may require substantial amount of time to help students learn use those tools. Despite these technological hindrances, these multimodal practices bring critical benefits to students in that they help students engage in the process of problem solving, collaboration, and awareness of how different modes can bring different designs and different ways of expressing messages.

New literacies and writing research

Examining how two women adopted computers for their literacy practices and how historical, social, and cultural contexts influenced their adoption of new technologies as literacy tools, Hawisher and Selfe pointed out that “writing instructors face the danger of teaching in ways that ignore the considerable strengths in technological literacies that some students bring to our classes (p.676).” Even though Hawisher and Selfe kept college writing classes in mind when they discussed the writing instructor’s failure of integrating new literacies into classes, I think that their pointing out this failure is also meaningful to the educational situation in general. In other words, the writing instructors’ failure of integrating new technologies involving new literacies and recognizing students’ experiences and knowledge with new literacites is a critical issue to consider seriously only for all schools, as well as college classes.
One of Hawisher and Selfe’s suggestions was that instructors need to have “a flexible understanding of composing and composition instruction (p. 677)” by appreciating students’ literacy practices involving new technologies. They suggested that this effort include examining students’ literacy practices using multimodal elements in digital environments; the processes of organizing the elements, designing compositions, and presenting them; and the roles of the forms of communication. Another suggestion of Hawisher and Selfe’s was that educators be responsible for closely examining the literacy practices that students involved in. The demand for research on new literacies was also suggested by Lankshear and Knobel (2003). In their paper presented in AERA 2003, Lankshear and Knobel recommended three ways of researching new literacies: descriptive, analytic and critical accounts.
According to Lankshear and Knobel, descriptive accounts of new literacies includes narratives or accounts of insiders (people who are deeply engaging in new literacy practices) on how new literacy practices are practices. Analytic accounts involve the academic and scholarly work discussing on the application of new literacy practices. Finally, critical-evaluative accounts of new literacies involve two types of perspectives: one is ethical perspective, and the other is related to curriculum and pedagogy perspective. Ethical perspective is related to our judgments on whether new ltieracies have educational worth and relevance. Curriculum and pedagogy perspectives are related to considering how new literacies as efficacious ways of learning can be connected in meaningful and mature versions of related social practices.

Gender differences in children's literacy practices

Both Martino (2001) and Kamler (1994) seemed to indicate there was complicated differences in literacy practices between boys and girls. Kamler's article about gender differences in children's writing was interesting in that it showed how boys and girls constructed their writing and expressed their experiences in a different way. In addition, their use of language in writing was different in terms of choice of vocabulary and interpreting their activities: the boy was focusing more active and robust actions than the girl. Even though Martino did not compare how boys and girls engage in reading different genres, his article definitely showed that boys had generally different reading preferences from girls.


As both authors implied, these gender differences in literacy practices are deeply rooted in gendered social practices that reproduce gender images. In this respect, it might be natural that children's choice of literacy practices are different by their socially constructed concept of genders because what they experience as boys or girls are different in their context.


However, taking a close look at boy's reading preferences in Martino's articles, (I might read it in a wrong way), allows me to see how these differences that we feel are actually something generalized by its majority. I mean that what we think of boy's reading preferences actually represents just a certain portion of the complicated picure of boys' reading preferneces. The details and other portion of this picture can be easily unnoticeable and also ignored because the social norms on literacy practices are gendered like other part of our culture bcecaus the social forces to simplify the complicated reality. As Martino indicated, the idea tha boys refuse reading and do not show interests in reading is based on social norms.

What was interesting to me in Martino's article was that a number of boys rejecting reading actually enjoyed reading other types of texts than literary texts. I think it might mean that these boys are reluctant to say that they like reading because literacy practices are socially considered more feminine activities rather than masculine.
The reluctance to avoid "not being" normal is also shown in the girls in Lalik and Oliver's (2007) article. As Lalik and Oliver described, the girls tried to avoid to use terminology that reminded of homosexuals.

The gender differences in literacy practices are socailly constructed. Kamler (1994) indicated that educators need to see these differences critically. It may mean that educators should help children experience various types of genres that are not gendered to question, challenge and resist the social norms on gender roles. Along with this, I think that children also have opportunity to share their real interests without any reluctance and talk about what makes the reluctance when they have interests different from one that considered to belong to one's gender.

Language or dialect

This week's articles about African American vernacular language made me think about the differences between a language and a dialect. I also instantly connected the discussions in the articles with the language situation in Korea.

According to a article in linguistics that I read long time ago (I don't remember who wrote this article and what exactly this article was about), some of the indigenous tribes in New Zealand think that they use different language from other tribes. However, as a linguist observed the communicative exchanges among people from different tribes, he could only find some semantic differences among those languages that these tribes used. What I also remember is that the class talked about how we discern a dialect from a language. These indigenous tribes tried to learn each other's languages for communication, thinking that language language was equally valuable for their life.

If we live in this kind of society, people might not be worried about which language they use. However, this is not the case in every society, especially when there is a national language, standard language, or official language that have more power than other types of languages. This is also the same in Korea. In Korea, the standard language is a Seoul dialect. Other than Seoul dialect, we basically have about 5 major dialects which are used in different regions of Korea, but the varieties of each dialect are more complicated. For example, my family on my father's side use a Choong-chung dialect but it also sounds like a Chula dialect in terms of their vocabulary, and intonation. That is because they used to live in the border area between Choong-chung and Chula provinces. The Seoul dialect is used in every official sites such as education, politics, and business in an oral form and in a written form. It is also used more often in mass media than other dialects.
(Seoul dialect and other dialects are totally different from one another in terms of vocabulary, pronunciation, and intonation. If people say in a 'real' dialect, I totally do not understand what they are saying.)

Basically, Seoul dialect makes the speakers of this particular dialect more privileged in that they have more accessibility to the institutions and systems that have power. Nevertheless, I have never heard that any teacher was trying to teach how to speak Seoul dialect correctly at school. Rather, the teachers in each local area choose to communicate children in their dialect during the class. One of my friends who were grown in Kyoungsang-do, where the dialect is so distinctive), went to a university in Seoul, and went to back to her hometown to teach. For first couple of months, she tried to speak in a Seoul dialect, but soon she decided to stop using it. The reason why she stopped it was really weird to keep using the Seoul dialect with the students who are using her childhood language, and home language. She said that she really felt detached from the students when she tried to speak in the Seoul Dialect.

Even though students in other regions than Seoul and it satellite cities use the local dialect at home, with peers, and even with teachers, I don't think that this cannot prevent them from learning the Standard form of Korean either in a written or an oral form. They learn it from their textbooks, storybooks, new paper, other types of mass media, and the Internet. Like the students in Godley et. al.'s (2007) article, students know from their experiences when they need to the Seoul dialect and which dialect works better in an official context. At the same time, they appreciate the dialect they are using with their family and friends because the dialect make them bonded to each other.

I acknowledge that the situation around African American Vernacular language is more complicated than the linguistic issues in Korea due to its complex historical and political reasons. However, I think that something that can be taken from the experiences of other cultures.