Genre and Register in Multiliteracies

Engaging with the world of “multiliteracies” entails two kinds of recognition — acknowledgment of the sociocultural diversity of our learners' worlds, and awareness of the impact of new communication technologies that combine linguistic modes of meaning with visual, gestural, spatial, and audio modes. There is no doubt that young people inhabit a vastly different communication environment to that of their parents. They interact with video games, internet sites, and text messaging systems as “digital natives,” whilst those from previous generations are, at best, digital immigrants ( Prensky, 2001 ). Multimodality is increasingly on the agenda in classrooms and some educators are endeavoring to bridge the digital divide. In a unit of work on fairytales, students will watch the movie, Shrek , as well as read traditional fairytales. They will discuss the humorous intertextual play that characterizes the popular feature film and they will themselves innovate on these traditional tales in their own responses — perhaps developing fractured fairytales in storyboard, animation or written mode. The authors of the New London Group have coined the word “Multiliteracies” to bring out the contrast between these possibilities and more traditional notions of literacy.