A Multimodal Framework for Computer Mediated Learning: The Reshaping of Curriculum Knowledge and Learning

functions to marshal communicative acts into (communicative) texts that realise
specific social practices. These three kinds of meaning functions are held by the
grammar and by the words (the Lexical-grammar) of language.

Social semiotic theory was developed in relation to language and has until recently
focused almost exclusively on speech and writing, with a few notable exceptions
(Hodge and Kress, 1988). Multimodality extends the concept of metafunctions
beyond language (speech and writing) to all communicative modes. It asserts that
through the cultural shaping of the affordances of modes in the work of semiosis
distinct and different potentials for meaning become developed in all semiotic modes
(speech, gesture, visual communication, music, and so on). The need to understand
the meaning of speech and writing in their multimodal context has however been
acknowledged, such as the potential of gestures to contribute to a holistic picture of
communication (Halliday, 1978: 37). Recently social semiotic research has begun to
take account of modes and systems of making meaning other than language,
including music, speech and sound (van Leeuwen, 1999), action (Martinec, 2000), as
well as visual communication (O'Toole 1994; Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996). Most
recently, work in the Hallidayan functional linguistic tradition, and in social
semiotics, has increasingly viewed the social production of systems of signs and
meanings as a multimodal phenomenon (Kress et. al, 2001, Kress and van Leeuwen,
2001; Martin and Veel, 1998; Baldry, 2001).

Meaning making starts in production with the interests of the sign maker as they are
configured in a specific social context and moment in time. Meaning making can be
understood as the interaction between the socially situated interest of the sign maker
and the potentials for meaning (what it is possible to mean) with the resources
available to them and their realisation in specific representational and
Communicational acts (signs). In other words on the one hand there is the socially
situated interests of the sign maker, the meaning potential of the semiotic resources of
a mode, what can be meant in a particular semantic mode, and on the other there is

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