ABSTRACT
Human beings use all kinds of bodily actions, such as speaking, gesturing, mime, and dancing, and both natural and human-made materials, including images, music, and clothes, in order to communicate with one another. When any such resource is developed and organised by a particular culture into a coherent meaning-making system, it may be called a ‘mode’ (Kress 2009: 58-9). It is not possible to draw up a comprehensive list of all the different modes available to us, because their number and delineation will shift and change over time and across different cultures and communities. However, we can distinguish, at the very least, between the following modes: speech, writing, still images, moving images, sound, music, and gesture. Accordingly, a multimodal text is one that combines two or more different modes, such as writing and still images in the case of a poster, or moving images, sound, music, and speech in a film, for example.
