Answer:
Explanation:
Supplements
1. The Language of Multimodal Texts
2. Table of Multimodal Terms by Discipline and Mode
3. Analyzing Multimodal Texts as Signs
4. Assignment Sheet for Analyzing a Multimodal Text
5. Advertising Analysis Questions
6. Example Shoe Ads
7. Writing the Advertising Analysis Thesis Statement
8. Photojournalism Analysis Questions
9. Visual Art Elements and Analysis Questions
10. Television/Film/Video Analysis Questions
11. Data Visualization Analysis Questions
Overview
Supporting multimodal literacy is an important aspect of education today as it encourages
students to understand the ways media shapes their world. Most, if not all texts today, can be
considered “multimodal texts,” as they combine modes such as visuals, audio, and alphabetic or
linguistic text. While it can be useful to create a distinction between multimodal texts and texts
that are primarily linguistic in order to clarify assignment goals, all texts can truly be considered
multimodal. Even an academic paper has multimodal elements such as font choice, doublespacing, margins, etc.
By teaching students multimodal analysis, you provide them access to a more complex way to
read all the texts they encounter. In their media-saturated lives, students engage with a large
number of multimodal texts per day that contain a variety of modes that work together to create
subtle methods of persuasion and often implicitly reinforce cultural stereotypes. Because
students are in the habit of passively viewing these texts, it’s important to model strategies that
will help them think critically about the messages directed at them through media.
However, while students have some experience analyzing traditional alphabetic texts, they often
have difficulty transferring what they know about analyzing these texts to analyzing multimodal
texts. And teaching students to analyze multimodal texts can be challenging as students have
grown accustomed to viewing such texts as entertainment or basic sources of information
without considering their meaning or context. Because analyzing multimodal texts is not
intuitive, students need explicit instruction in order to gain multimodal literacy. Just as we teach
students to perform a close reading or textual analysis on alphabetic texts, it’s important to
provide students with skills and models that will help them bring a critical eye to multimodal texts.
