Resource+4

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Calum Henderson The above resource is a video that tells a story. The video uses music, spoken word, animations, pictures and text to convey the message of the story. The use of different media makes the story very engaging.

This resource above would be used to demonstrate to the students how a multimodal text works. It would be focussing on the use of multimodal texts in literacy, with special reference to what makes a multimodal text.

Although it is not directly linked with the colonisation of Australia, the digression in topics and the fact that this story has nothing to do with the colonisation will allow students to separate learning about multimodality from learning about colonisation. After the lesson using this resource, students will then have a good understanding of how multimodal texts work. They will then be able to join the knowledge that they have of multimodal texts with the knowledge that they have about the colonisation of Australia in order for them to make their own multimodal texts.

This resource will allow students to focus on “learning about writing” in the K-6 English syllabus, it will allow students to work towards outcome “WS2.14 - Discusses how own texts have been structured to achieve their purpose and the grammatical features characteristic of the various text types used.” (BOS NSW, 200, p. 19). This text will allow students to see an example of a multimodal text and will demonstrate how multimodal texts can be used in order to achieve a purpose through engaging an audience. It also demonstrates the characteristics of a multimodal text.

This video is an effective resource as it uses a wide number of aspects of a multimodal text. Healy states that a “Multimodal text is designed using all or a combination of five design elements: Linguistic design, Audio design, spatial design, visual design and gestural design”, and the video above uses the aspects of multimodal design that we want our students to use (2004, p. 21). We want our students to create a text that uses audio, visual and linguistic design, and this text uses these elements as well. This will allow the students to be familiar with visuals, audio and text being used together in order to create meaning, and although our students will be doing it in a much simpler way, the lessons that they can learn from this text will help them immensely.

Meaning in this text is spread across the different modes and all of them work together to create the meaning of the text. This is important as “we need now to gather meaning from all modes which are co=present in a text” (Kress, 2003, p. 35). We can gather meaning from all modes of this text and we can understand how the meaning comes form each different mode. When teaching a stage 2 class using the resource, the teacher would not necessarily go into full detail of the different modes, but could outline the fact that the different types of communication are used to create meaning.

This resource would be a good resource for teaching multimodal texts as it demonstrates different modes of texts being used together to create meaning. It would be useful in our unit of work as it would allow students to separate learning about colonisation from learning about multimodality.

Reference List

BOS NSW (2007). English K-6 Syllabus. BOS NSW: Sydney.

Healy, A. (2004). The critical heart of multiliteracies: four resources, multimodal texts and classroom practice in Text next: new resources for literacy learning (pp. 19-35. Newtown, N.S.W.: PETA.

Kress, G. (2003). Literacy in the New Media Age. Routledge: London.