Multimodal literacy in secondary language arts classes: High school youths’ genre appropriation through multimodal composing

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Meaning-making as Social Action across Media, Disciplines, and Identities

Abstract

This study explored multimodal projects created by high school students in language arts classes and how they grappled to express themselves in a new genre, responding to an assignment to create films about books they read. Multimodal analysis of students’ videos led to categories coalescing around three themes: how students appropriated a variety of video genres in different degrees, how students achieved intermodal harmony by orchestrating modal resources, and how they learned to express themselves while growing audience awareness. These multimodal practices availed new literacy choices for meaning making, and for grappling with their personal interpretation of literature, negotiating their role as creators, and navigating the challenges of communicating complex ideas in unfamiliar formats/tools, adapting to new communicative demands.

Authors

• Hannah Park, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Hongye Zeng, University of Maryland