ABSTRACT
Since encountering Gunther Kress’ work 15 years ago, I have employed a multimodal perspective to re-look at key concerns and concepts of an “academic literacies” approach to teaching and research. “Academic literacies” is “a field of enquiry with a specific epistemological and ideological stance towards the study of academic communication” (Lillis & Scott, 2007, p. 5). The key concern of my research has been about providing diverse students access to academic practices in ways that recognize their resources. Using Kress’ work in this way is particularly pertinent in a context like South Africa, given our legacy of inequitable social, economic, political, and educational opportunities. The written mode has rightly been the predominant focus in “academic literacies” approaches. However, a monomodal focus does not allow reflection on the change in division of labour between image and writing in a range of registers, also contributed to by the Internet and multimedia technologies (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001, 2006; Jewitt, 2006). These changes in the division of labour have resulted in changes in learning materials (Bezemer & Kress, 2008) as well as the texts students need to produce for assessment purposes in Higher Education (Archer, 2010).
