ABSTRACT
It is now widely accepted that literacy and literacy pedagogy can no longer be confined to the realm of language alone, and that reconceptualizing literacy and literacy education needs to include the role of images (as well as other modes of meaning-making). In Australia, State English syllabi generally require students to learn about the role of images in their comprehension, and to a lesser extent, their composition of various kinds of texts. However, while either traditional or some form of functional grammar (influenced by the systemic functional linguistics (SFL) of Michael Halliday and his colleagues (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004; Martin, 1992) is required to be taught, no such comparable metalanguage for describing the meaning-making resources of images and image-text interaction is included or recommended as a resource for developing multimodal literacy. Faced with the requirement to address the multimodality of texts, the prescription of verbal grammar and the absence in syllabi of comparably theorized resources for describing the meaning-making resources of images, some teacher educators and teachers have made use of the “grammar of visual design” developed by Kress and van Leeuwen (2001/2006), extrapolating from SFL accounts of language. The commonality of the systemic functional theoretical approach to language and image as social semiotic systems facilitates an articulation of visual and verbal grammar as descriptive and analytical resources in developing students’ comprehension and composition of multimodal texts. However, beyond accounting for the independent, albeit sometimes strategically aligned, contributions of language and image to the meaning of composite texts, is the challenge of systematically describing resources for the construction of meaning at the intersection of language and image. This chapter will outline recent work addressing this challenge. In the next section I will outline the key tenets of systemic functional semiotic theory that facilitate its use in describing meaning-making resources within and across a variety of modes of meaning including language and images. The subsequent section, and main body of the chapter, will outline ongoing research dealing with the development of descriptions of meaning-making resources of image-language interaction. Finally, I will suggest – on the basis of research reporting the
pedagogic efficacy of the metalanguage of SFL, some work on the pedagogic use of the grammar of visual design and the discussion in previous sections of the emerging research on descriptions of image-language interaction – that teachers, teacher-educators and researchers consider further the pedagogic potential of existing and emerging metalanguage drawing on systemic functional semiotic approaches to multimodal texts.
