ABSTRACT
Recent discussions on multiliteracies have focused on the future of literacy teaching in the wider “global village,” with little concentration on multiliteracy in second and foreign language contexts. Notable exceptions to this are discussions by Lo Bianco (2000), Stenglin and ledema (2001), and Royce (2002). Lo Bianco (2000), as part of the Multiliteracies Project by the New London Group, discusses the role of multiliteracies and personal–societal multilingualism, and considers the effects of globalization on multiliteracy practices in multicultural contexts, suggesting a need to “create a metalanguage to unite disparate areas of communication and representation, multimodally as well as multiculturally, into a new pedagogy” (p. 99). Stenglin and ledema (2001) address the necessity for TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) teachers to understand and systematically use visual analysis “tools” in their classrooms to help students to read visuals and to develop in-class teaching materials/techniques to facilitate that process (p. 195). They propose three sets of tools which can be used to analyze images, and make the point that the knowledge of how to analyze visuals is “crucial to students’ understanding of how meanings are made in multi-modal texts” (p. 207). Royce (2002), via an analysis of a multimodal text extracted from an introductory environmental science textbook, examines some of the ways that TESOL professionals can explore with their students the copresence of visual and linguistic modes in their textbooks, and suggests that teachers should be increasingly concerned with developing their students’ multi-modal communicative competence as a result of the technologizing of modes of communication (p. 192).
