Literacy Culture and Language Education

Multimodal discourse analysis (MMDA) examines how people use various forms of communication—such as words, images, sound, gesture, and layout—to construct meaning in social contexts. This approach acknowledges that meaning is inherently multimodal, with different modes operating simultaneously to enhance communication's richness and intensity. By combining modes, new meanings can emerge, and elements across different modes can either reinforce, complement, or contradict one another. Jewitt (2006) outlines three main approaches to MMDA, each emphasizing different aspects related to contexts, systems, and sign-makers. Resources such as scholarly works, seminal texts like those by the New London Group (1996), and technological tools like Atlas.ti and Dedoose support the study and analysis of multimodal discourse. Examples of dissertations incorporating MMDA, such as those by Fiscus (2018), Ma (2005), and Lewis (2013), demonstrate the diverse applications of multimodality in empirical ...

Multimodal Literacy In doing my autoethnographic dissertation I looked at an electronic Voicethread that supports my iterative growth and interaction, offering a portfolio to examine my self-directed learning, defining and understanding multimodal literacy practice is essential. My multimodal literacy practices helped my study tell its story of my ontological and epistemological changes as a migrant English teacher. Multimodal literacy has a long history that is deeply intertwined with movements in 21st-century skills and literacy practices. Camiciottoli & Campoy-Cubillo (2018) explain how multimodal literacy is entwined in ELT. Clarifications are made about not using multimodality theory or methods for this study. This section closes with canonical definitions of multimodal literacy and how they are important to this study’s interpretation of the teacher researcher’s funds of knowledge under inquiry.  During my graduate coursework, I was interested in discourse analysis, espec...