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.