ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the implementation of multiliteracies in South African language, literacy, and literature classrooms from the mid-1990s to the present. It discusses the transformational power of multiliteracies as a cultural and semiotic concept and as a pedagogy in multilingual, multicultural contexts. This power was able to shatter monolingual colonial-type practices in our classrooms and opened up possibilities for an expansion of communication skills not previously seen. This work presents early implementations at primary and secondary schools, and in teacher education, demonstrating how they broke down classroom walls, acknowledged students’ own semiotic practices, and brought the outside in, even across the oceans. Our discussion also examines more recent work which speaks to decolonial imperatives and retains the framework of both cultural and semiotic plurality and the multiliteracies pedagogic processes, while stressing the need to serve multilingual learners through translanguaging instructional practices based on target and Indigenous languages.
