Language in Digital Motion: From ABCs to Intermediality and Why This Matters for Language Learning
Linguistic communication has moved beyond simple alphabetic encoding to multimedia design, challenging the fit of structural theories of language to digital communication. This transition is barely evident in mobile language learning contexts where top-se
- PDF / 551,206 Bytes
- 22 Pages / 419.528 x 595.276 pts Page_size
- 97 Downloads / 183 Views
Language in Digital Motion: From ABCs to Intermediality and Why This Matters for Language Learning Heather Lotherington
Contents
7.1 Introduction 7.2 Language and Literacy 7.3 The Expanding Borders of Language in Digital Communication 7.4 Theorizing Multimodal Communication: Two Views 7.5 Modality, Mode, and Media in Digital Communication 7.6 Conclusion: From ABCs to Intermediality References
217 219 222 225 227 235 236
7.1 Introduction The context with which this chapter grapples is mobile language learning. Recent research (Lotherington 2018) indicates that top commercial mobile (m-)learning apps tend to rely heavily on outmoded structural
H. Lotherington (*) York University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 L. Elleström (ed.), Beyond Media Borders, Volume 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49679-1_7
217
218
H. LOTHERINGTON
models of language and tap dated behaviouristic pedagogies in their lessons, typically applying gamification veneers to attract and maintain users. Popular m-learning apps predominantly feature levelled vocabulary study, and to a lesser extent, language structure, aka grammar. Linguistic communication, however, has moved from simple alphabetic encoding to multimedia design in digital environments; this challenges the fit of structural theories of language to digital language learning contexts. In language teaching and learning literature, multimodality describes communication employing diverse semiotic resources in texts not limited to alphabetically (or logographically or syllabically) encoded language. In reality, all communication is multimodal; however, professional awareness of multimodal communication in language teaching emanates particularly from digital texts and discourses, which are created using a broader palette of meaning- making resources than static print texts, ergo, multimedia texts. The predominating trend has been to approach digital multimodal communication from a social semiotics paradigm (e.g., Bezemer and Kress 2008, 2016; Jewitt 2008; Kress 2000, 2003, 2005, 2009, 2011). Shortly after the turn of the century, Kress (2003: 1) predicted: “the combined effects on writing of the dominance of the mode of image and of the medium of the screen will produce deep changes in the forms and functions of writing.” Mode, though, is not defined. Jewitt (2004: 84), clarifies the concept of mode as indexing “technologies of representation (the modes of ‘multimodality’),” and contrasts mode with media, which indexes “technologies of dissemination (the media of multimedia).” As social semiotic conceptualizations of multisemiotic composition have grown in concert with increasingly sophisticated, grammatically differentiated digital communication, the terrain of multimodal communication can be seen to overlap considerably with that of intermediality theorizing. The fundamental building blocks of mode and media, which, in a social semiotics reading based in linguistics, rely largely on cultural interpretat
Data Loading...
