making sense of this multimodal environment. All of these modes work together to
realise meaning and writing and speech are embedded in this multimodal ensemble;
each mode offers different resources for meaning making and all modes including
language, speech and writing, are partial in the realisation of this meaning. For these
reasons a focus on language alone can not give a full account of what literacy is
(Kress, 2003). There is, therefore, a need to expand our understanding of literacy in
relation to new technology and, more broadly, to re-think literacy in order to
accommodate the complex multimodal literacy repertoires that young people develop
in the multimodal environment that they live in (Snyder, 2002; Street, 1998).
Students learning with new technologies are involved in the complex task of
interpreting the multimodal signs on screen and the relationships between them.
Whereas in the recent past images have been on the whole secondary and
backgrounded with respect to language in relation to formal education, this
relationship is changed in technology-mediated learning (and I would argue
elsewhere). This change is marked by the increase in visual representation and the
visualisation of writing as a mode'. The ‘reader’ is involved in the task of finding and
creating reading paths through the multimodal, multidirectional texts on the screen -
a fluidity that is beginning to seep out onto the page of printed books (Moss, 2001;
Kress, 2003). Writing, image and other modes combine to convey multiple meanings
and encourage the reader to reject a single interpretation and to hold possible multiple
readings of a text (Coles and Hall, 2001). The multimodal character of the screen
does not indicate a single entry point, a beginning and an end, rather it indicates that
texts are layered and offers multiple entry points. This offers the ‘reader’ new
potentials for ‘reading’ a text and the design of the text through engagement with it.
Reading a written text on a page is essentially a linear event in which the author and
1 Images and the visual character of writing have been foregrounded at other points in history.
The reasons for the dominance of image in the past, such as the low written literacy of the
population and the extreme elitism of writing, do not stand behind the current trend toward
image over word. The current visualisation of communication appears to be rooted in
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