Multimodality, 'reading' and literacy - C. Jewitt

Reading has to be seen in a wider perspective, to include multimodality instead of just literary aspects because the conventional perspective of reading - that reading is solely literal may limit individual from potential meaning making. Viewing reading as multimodal, starting from school, will enable students to bring a range of modes into their reading instead of just reading the words for meaning.

Often when we think of multimodal, there is this tendency to think that the use of different modes such as visuals, video and text need to be present in the same space. However even reading texts alone can be multimodal because reading is affected by the spatial organisation and framing of writing on the page, the directionality, shape, size and angle of a script(Kenner, 2000, which means that different scripts can be seen as different modes, giving rise to a variety of potentials for meaning-making with different representational principles underlying each writing system (Kenner and Kress, 2003). For example, in this digital storybook, the different fonts and sizes represents different meaning.



It is interesting to read into the kind of fonts used and the size of the fonts to represent different words and different meanings. The word SALE is familiar to us, not only because of the spelling, but also because of the type of font used, all in capital letters.

Hence, when we talk about multimodality and literacy, text or written words do not really have to take a back seat, but rather we should bring attention to the various roles writing play, and perhaps as mentioned in class on topology and topography, because it contributes to meaning making.

Of course in this era where technology is the main driving force in our society, knowing how to read means that readers need to make sense of images and other modes of representation and communication that is available on the screen. This is necessary because the full message of the screen has been distributed across the different modes and in order to get this full message we need to read the different modes and combine it together.

Just like the activity done in class on the best and worst websites, we needed to view the different modes available on the website to design our own complete meaning of the text.