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Speakers Abstracts - Plenary Speakers
Professor Theo van Leeuwen - The discursive construction of social space
This paper discusses how space is created and arranged to suit specific social practices, focussing especially on the role of language in maintaining or transforming such disciplines of social space.
A system network will be presented and illustrated with examples from a range of multimodal texts, including children's books, home improvement magazines and texts dealing with the layout of classrooms and office space.
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Professor Jim Martin - Intermodal reconciliation: mates in arms
As many commentators have observed, dragging people into war is a simple matter - "all you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." (Hermann Goering, 1938). Enhancing this, of course, is demonisation of the enemy as a thoroughly evil other (as documented throughout Discourse & Society 15.2-3, 2004). All this makes reconciliation after war a complex and time consuming matter, requiring a radical realignment of feelings, from one side to the other. And part of this involves re-humanising the other, as people we want to live with rather than destroy. In this paper I'll consider one instance of this realignment strategy, focussing on the appraisal resources mobilised by verbiage and image in a recent children's picture book which focuses on Australian-Japanese warfare on the Kokoda Trail in New Guinea in WWII (Wolfer & Harrison-Lever's Photographs in the Mud) - by way of exploring, some 50 years after the event, how hatred might be undone.
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Professor John Stephens - The Discourses of Environment and Ecology in Children's Literature: Anthropocentrism and the Haecceitas of Nature
The discourses about environment and ecology produced for child audiences remain pivotally shaped by anthropocentric assumptions, a construing of natural phenomena in a way that sustains a central place for the human species. In a consideration of a range of texts and text types (interactive CD-ROM, picture book, novel) focused on the boundary between land and water, this paper considers the extent to which texts for children indicate awareness of the role discourse plays in constructing an anthropocentric 'meaning' of nature, especially through a point of view which directs the perceptions of its target audience or attributes symbolic or metaphoric roles to nature. How far does language mould reality in conformity with hegemonic tendencies? Or can the potential of language to defamiliarise the taken-for-granted, especially within multimodal discourses, be employed to elide or minimise human presence and express a haecceitas in nature that eludes anthropocentric language?
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Professor Peter Freebody - The cognitive and moral functions of visual modalities in classrooms
This presentation will cover two general topics: a report of research oninteraction- and modality-related differences between and subject areasin school, and a discussion of the ways in which images function inmoral and ideological assemblages in texts and talk. The presentationwill conclude with a number of recommendations (for teachers, producersof school texts, and teacher-educators) concerning the need fordiscipline-specific understandings of multimodalities, in particular asthey (re)produce moral relationships among categories of people.
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Dr Mary Macken-Horarik - Choice, Salience, Complementarity: The challenge of multiliteracies in an era of 'basic skills' accountability
The contemporary landscape of school English presents teachers with rich opportunities for interesting textual work and, at the same time, unsettling calls for greater accountability on relatively narrow standards of literacy achievement. What happens when the centrifugal proliferation of diverse literacies of a cultural studies curriculum meets centripetal pressures from above for greater accountability on students' 'basic skills'?
In this paper I want to consider examination texts presented for 'reading' at different levels of schooling as well as those composed by students in response to questions. Using tools from systemic functional semiotics, I analyze three aspects of examination semiosis in English and Visual Arts. Firstly, I reflect on the choices available in relatively open-ended assessment tasks inviting a response from students. Secondly, I highlight the choices embodied in successful students' responses and the kinds of social and semiotic salience we need to pay attention to. Thirdly, I consider the issue of complementarity in multimodal communication - the different 'roles' played by verbal and visual modes in texts produced by students in both Visual Arts and in English and their differential valuation in each discipline.
I conclude with some reflections on the implications of my social semiotic analysis for development of a robust multiliteracies education.
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Speakers Abstracts - Keynote Speakers
Associate Professor Jane Torr - Multimodal texts and emergent literacy in early childhood: Implications for educators
Babies are born into a world rich in visual images and written text. Manyhomes have computers and toddlers may begin to interact using digital technologiesat the same time as they are learning to talk, to engage with picture booksand to make marks on paper using pencils and crayons. Expressions such as "visualliteracy‰ and "digital literacy‰ reflect the fact that literacy developmentinvolves learning how to communicate using a range of semiotic systems, eachrequiring particular skills, knowledge and attitudes. Yet little is known abouthow very young children, who cannot yet read and write in conventional terms,construe the meanings they encounter in picture books and the visual and auralfeatures of computer games. How do the interactions between adults and youngchildren surrounding picture books and computer games foster children‚s emergingliteracy understandings? In this paper, I shall draw on analyses of naturalspontaneous interactions between mothers, preschool teachers and very youngchildren, to explore children‚s engagement with multimodal texts. The implicationsof this research for early childhood educators and parents will be explored.
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Dr Louise Ravelli - Analysing space: adapting and extending multi-modal frameworks
In analysing multi-modal texts, much work already exists which provides a way to engage with 'space', that is, three-dimensional texts, as a meaning-making resource. The frameworks developed by Kress and van Leeuwen, primarily for the analysis of two-dimensional visual texts, provide an important foundation for this analysis, and these have been extended and adapted to begin to account for the additional complexities of other text types (for instance, Pang 2004; Ravelli 2005; Stenglin 2004; White 1994). This paper will outline some of the ways in which these extensions and adaptations work, providing a framework to 'read' three-dimensional texts. It will draw on a range of texts in the built environment which have been selected and analysed by students in a University course on Visual Communication. The paper will highlight some of the key theoretical principles which need to be incorporated in these analyses, such as foregrounding and intersemiosis, and reflect on the role and relevance of such analyses in contemporary society.
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Dr Clare Painter - Interpersonal meaning and choices of "ambience" in children's picture books
Children's narrative picture books are bi-modal texts, sometimes of considerable sophistication, in which the visual and verbal strands of meaning collaborate to facilitate the apprenticeship of children into literacy and literature. In order to better understand the nature of this collaboration, we need as full an appreciation of the visual semiotic as systemic-functional linguistics has provided us with for the verbal. This paper aims to contribute to such an appreciation by drawing on collaborative work undertaken with Jim Martin and Len Unsworth to build on Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996) pioneering work on visual grammar, particularly with respect to the interpersonal metafunction. Their systems of CONTACT and MODALITY (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996) will be re-considered and interpreted here in the light of picture book data as systems of FOCALISATION and AMBIENCE. In focussing on the latter, it will be argued that the role of circumstantial meaning in a visual text is largely an interpersonal one (in contrast with its ideational role in language) and that colour choices play a key role in realising this form of meaning, which is a crucial one in terms of the reader's ongoing affective response to the text. Examples of the different options from the system of ambience will be given from well regarded picture books and it will be shown how continuity or shifts in ambience over the course of a text play a subtle and significant part in contributing to the narrative's meaning.
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Dr Angela Thomas - The Machinima Explosion and its Transforming Potential for Innovation in Literacy Education with Frontier Technologies
Machinima, a term derived from the words "machine cinema" (Wikipedia, 2006), is defined as "the convergence of filmmaking, animation and game development… [it] is real-world filmmaking techniques applied within an interactive virtual space where characters and events can be either controlled by humans, scripts or artificial intelligence". (Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences, 2002-2003, online). Over the past few years, machinima has become very popular in online gaming communities, with gaming fans creating their own short movies of their in-virtual-world role-playing. Similarly, machinima groups such as those at the popular video-sharing community, youtube.com are exploring new ways of blending gaming characters and settings into music video clips, fan fiction movie trailers, and experimental narratives. Such groups include young 13 year old novices, to older professionals who are 3D animation engineers and artists by trade.
This rising phenomena within global contexts has influenced children in Australia who have been involved in producing 3D animated narratives with Kahootz. Kahootz is a multimedia 3D authoring tool that has been adopted for use in many Australian schools. The program was developed in 2002 by the Australian Children's Television Foundation (ACTF). It is now being adopted by many schools in Britain, New Zealand, and Asia and is about to be marketed in the US. The Kahootz developers have upgraded their software to allow easy import of Kahootz animations into i-movie, with potential for the importing of sound files and blue screen editing. Accordingly, machinima has become a significant outcome from children's production of Kahootz animations.
In this paper I will analyse the semiotic structures of four examples of machinima in order to make a comparative study of the skills, techniques, narrative structure and semiotic resources used in each: two from the primary school children in Australia, and two from adult-produced machinima set in Second Life. The semiotic analyses will employ tools of functional grammar (Halliday, Martin and Rose, 2003, 1994; White, 2001), visual grammar (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996) and multimodal discourse analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001). The machinima constructed by children, I will argue, are of a highly sophisticated construction in terms of narrative, originality and innovation, and are well matched in semiotic resource deployment with those constructed by adults. Through the analyses, I will demonstrate that the children are learning the high end skills and creativity of approach that will equip them for more sophisticated platforms in the future and for innovation with the frontier technology of tomorrow.
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Professor Ian Hay - Enhancing children's early literacy development using dialogue strategies
There is a growing consensus from a linguistic perspective that appropriate early learning and language experiences can act as protective factors, with positive effects upon the cognitive and social development of children to help allay serious educational and behaviour problems. Further to this is the belief that positive adult and child dialogues and linguistic interactions can facilitate a child's language development and literacy development. There is also a growing appreciation that children's language and literacy development is better understood within its linguistic and sociocultural content with educators needing to be sensitive to this content and working with it to facilitate children's educational development. In this presentation a language and early reading program developed for urban schools in a low socio-economic status, disadvantaged, and culturally diverse community will be reviewed.
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