ABSTRACT
In this chapter, accounts of multimodal representations of meaning are set against a short chronology of writing practices in the history of schooling. Consideration is also given to the different points of departure for thinking about representing meaning including cognitive, affective, design based, interpersonal, exploratory, creative and socio-political. Accounts of the representation of meaning start with examples of young children’s sensory experiences in representing meaning, ranging from the use of jumbo pencils to cameras and typing. Children’s sense of photography is explored along with children’s early experiences in mark making. Accounts of pathways children explore in sorting the graphics of the alphabetic forms of language in relation to alphabet names and sounds as well as word forms are presented including the emerging senses of orthography and visual semantics children demonstrate. Three children’s compositional efforts are examined through noting the novelty within the compositions, and reading the representation of meaning that was created in terms of features such as topical coherence, structural devices, transitions, prosody, image–word concurrence and complementarity, semantic ties, idea chains and genre practices.
