This collection critically considers the question of how learning and teaching should be conceived, understood, and approached in light of the changing nature of learning scenarios and new pedagogies in this current age of multimodal digital texts, practices, and communities. The book takes the concept of digital artifacts as being composed of multiple meaning-making semiotic resources, such as visuals, music, and design, as its point of departure to explore how diverse communities interact with these tools and develop and explore their understanding of digital practices in learning contexts. The first section of the volume examines different case studies in which involved participants learn to grapple with the introduction of digital tools for learning in children’s early years of schooling. The second section extends the focus to secondary and higher education settings as digital learning tools grow more complex as do students, parents, and teachers’ interactions with them and the subsequent need for new pedagogies to rethink these multimodal artifacts. A final section reflects on the implications of new multimodal tools, technologies, and pedagogies for teachers, such as on teacher training and community building among educators. In its in-depth look at multimodal approaches to learning as meaning-making in a digital world, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in multimodality, English language teaching, digital communication, and education.

This collection critically considers the question of how learning and teaching should be conceived, understood, and approached in light of the changing nature of learning scenarios and new pedagogies in this current age of multimodal digital texts, practices, and communities. The book takes the concept of digital artifacts as being composed of multiple meaning-making semiotic resources, such as visuals, music, and design, as its point of departure to explore how diverse communities interact with these tools and develop and explore their understanding of digital practices in learning contexts. The first section of the volume examines different case studies in which involved participants learn to grapple with the introduction of digital tools for learning in children’s early years of schooling. The second section extends the focus to secondary and higher education settings as digital learning tools grow more complex as do students, parents, and teachers’ interactions with them and the subsequent need for new pedagogies to rethink these multimodal artifacts. A final section reflects on the implications of new multimodal tools, technologies, and pedagogies for teachers, such as on teacher training and community building among educators. In its in-depth look at multimodal approaches to learning as meaning-making in a digital world, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in multimodality, English language teaching, digital communication, and education.

This book offers a multimodal perspective on how to design meaningful learning experiences with digital technologies. Digital education is of increasing importance in today’s digital society and the editors bring together international thought-leaders and well-established academics across geographical regions to explore the topic. The book addresses the need to design learning with digital technologies, especially in a post-pandemic environment where blended learning has become ubiquitous. The book is organised around five themes: designing learning, digital learning designs, digital learning with embodied teaching, digital learning interactions, and digital multimodal literacies. The chapters focus on digital technologies as multimodal semiotic resources and the educational implication of each theme is drawn out from illustrative cases across contexts of learning. Essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students, this book offers state-of-the-art thinking on how educators can design new learning experiences for students through the meaningful and effective use of digital technologies. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Foreign Language Learning in the Digital Age addresses the growing significance of diversifying media in contemporary society and expands on current discourses that have formulated media and a multitude of literacies as integral objectives in 21st-century education. The book engages with epistemological and critical foundations of multiliteracies and related pedagogies for foreign language-learning contexts. It includes a discussion of how multimodal and digital media impact meaning-making practices in learning, the inherent potentials and challenges that are foregrounded in the use of multimodal and digital media and the contribution that (foreign) language education can provide in developing multiliteracies. The volume additionally addresses foreign language education across the formal educational spectrum: from primary education to adult and teacher education. This multifaceted volume presents the scope of media and literacies for foreign language education in the digital age and examples of best practice for working with media in formal language learning contexts. This book will be of great interest to academics, researchers, and post-graduate students in the fields of language teaching and learning, digital education, media education, applied linguistics and TESOL.

Taking a close look at multimodal composing as an essential new literacy in schools, this volume draws from contextualized case studies across educational contexts to provide detailed portraits of teachers and students at work in classrooms. Authors elaborate key issues in transforming classrooms with student multimodal composing, including changes in teachers, teaching, and learning. Six action principles for teaching for embodied learning through multimodal composing are presented and explained. The rich illustrations of practice encourage both discussion of practical challenges and dilemmas and conceptualization beyond the specific cases. Historically, issues in New Literacy Studies, multimodality, new literacies, and multiliteracies have primarily been addressed theoretically, promoting a shift in educators’ thinking about what constitutes literacy teaching and learning in a world no longer bounded by print text only. Such theory is necessary (and beneficial for re-thinking practices). What Multimodal Composing in Classrooms contributes to this scholarship are the voices of teachers and students talking about changing practices in real classrooms.

Over the past three decades, our conceptualizations of literacy and what it means to be literate have expanded to include recognition that there is a qualitative difference in how we communicate through modalities such as the visual, audio, spatial, and linguistic and that different modes are combined in complex ways to make meaning. The field of multimodality is concerned with how human beings use different modes of communication to represent or make meaning in the world. Despite the rapid growth of international research in this area, accounts of a broader range of global sites, particularly economically under-resourced and culturally diverse contexts such as Sub-Saharan Africa, remain under-researched and under-represented in the literature. This book contextualizes a range of literacies including health literacies, community literacies, family literacies, and multilingual literacies within broader modes of communication, most specifically play and the visual. The claim is that powerful pedagogies, methodologies and theories can be constructed by taking a more detailed look at multimodal meaning-making in diverse contexts. By describing and analyzing multimodal practices and texts across a diverse range of contexts, the book highlights different constructs, issues and emerging questions dealing with the study of literacies and multimodality.

Multimodal Literacy challenges dominant ideas around language, learning, and representation. Using a rich variety of examples, it shows the range of representational and communicational modes involved in learning through image, animated movement, writing, speech, gesture, or gaze. The effect of these modes on learning is explored in different sites including formal learning across the curriculum in primary, secondary, and higher education classrooms, as well as learning in the home. The notion of literacy and learning as a primary linguistic accomplishment is questioned in favor of the multimodal character of learning and literacy. By illustrating how a range of modes contributes to the shaping of knowledge and what it means to be a learner, Multimodal Literacy provides a multimodal framework and conceptual tools for a fundamental rethinking of literacy and learning.