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Lecture to discuss new approaches to classroom grammar

October 24, 2005

unsworth.jpgNew communication media that allow a more intimate blend of words and images are prompting education researchers to devise new approaches to grammar that include the “grammar” of pictures.

Len Unsworth, Professor in English and Literacies Education at The University of New England, is a leader in this field. He will discuss this new perspective on literacy during a free public lecture in Armidale next week.

“What we need is a grammar that clearly describes the ways combinations of words and images convey meanings,” Professor Unsworth said. His Inaugural Lecture, in Armidale Town Hall at 7.30 pm on Wednesday 2 November, will be illustrated with examples of such verbal/visual texts, including several from the Internet. These range from government reports to electronic versions of children’s books. “We need to develop the theory and practice of teaching the multiliteracies required in diverse aspects of contemporary educational and social life,” he emphasised.

“At the moment there’s an imbalance,” he explained. “We have detailed grammatical systems describing how words communicate meaning, but nothing comparable for pictures. School English syllabuses are increasingly recognising that, in many texts, words and images are interrelated, and need to be ‘read’ as a whole. But there’s still no consensus among educators about the real nature of this mixture of images and language or about the grammar needed to describe it.”

Professor Unsworth (pictured here), who was a classroom teacher for 10 years before moving into teacher education, said that Basic Skills Tests in all Australian States were becoming more sensitive to the role of images in literacy.

His book "Teaching Multiliteracies Across the Curriculum" (Open University Press, UK, 2001) was a pioneering work on teaching school students to appreciate the subtleties of verbal/visual communication. Among his other books are "Teaching Children’s Literature with Information and Communication Technologies" (with co-authors Angela Thomas, Alyson Simpson and Jenny Asha), published by the Open University Press in 2005, and "E-literature for Children: Enhancing Digital Literacy Learning", to be published shortly by Routledge.

He is the Principal Investigator in two large research projects funded by the Australian Government on the subject of “multimodal reading”. The second of these projects, to begin next year, is subtitled “Multimodal reading comprehension in conventional and computer-based formats”. He is convening a national conference on “Multimodal Texts and Multiliteracies”, to be held at UNE next September.

“My main concern is looking for meaning at the intersection of language and image,” he explained.


Media contact: Professor Len Unsworth, School of Education, UNE (02) 6773 2677 or Jim Scanlan, Public Relations, UNE (02) 6773 3049.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at October 24, 2005 04:16 PM