illustrator guide the eye in a particular direction connected to the reading of a text.
Multiple reading paths have always been a part of the repertoire of an experienced
reader (Coles and Hall, 2001) multimodal texts of the screen, however, redefine the
work of the reader, who has to work to construct a narrative or assert their own
meanings via their path through a text. The design of some children’s books (such as
The Jolly Pocket Postman, Ahlberg and Ahlberg, 1995) and many magazines aimed
at young people serves to fragment the notion of narrative and to encourage the
reader to see themselves as ‘writers’. In doing so these texts ‘undo’ the literary forms
of closure and narrative. Nonetheless, the potentials for movement and closure
through the screen texts discussed in this thesis is fundamentally different from the
majority of classic book based literary forms and offer the reader the potential to
‘create’ (however partially) the text being read.
I have demonstrated that the move from page to screen together with a multimodal
approach to learning have important implications for traditional conceptions of school
literacy as a matter of competencies in reading and writing. Against this background,
however, educational policy and assessment continues to promote a linguistic view of
literacy and a linear view of reading which fails to connect with the kinds of literacy
required in the school with the ‘out-of-school worlds’ of most young people. The
government’s National Literacy Strategy (DFES, 1998) is, for example, informed by
a linguistic and print-based conceptualisation of literacy in which the focus is on
‘word’, ‘sentence’, and ‘text’. The Literacy Strategy and the National Curriculum
more generally, herald new technologies as a useful learning tool but, as I hope I have
shown, the multimodal character of new technologies produces a tension for
traditional conceptions of literacy that maintain language at their centre. Traditional
forms of assessment, for instance, place an emphasis on students’ hand-writing and
spelling, skills that the facilities of computers make differently relevant for learning.
At the same time, assessment fails to credit the acquisition of new skills that new
globalisation and the changing relationship between work, knowledge and information (New
London Group, 1996).
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