And now, a few theoretical words on Multimodality - PowerPoint Presentation

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And now, a few theoretical words on MultimodalitySlide2

Multimodality is nothing new in the worldSlide3

But until recently, educator types liked to ignore the implications of visual elements other than printSlide4

Words, numbers, and symbols ruled.Slide5

But then, something happened:

The internetSlide6

And now, educators are just

ga-ga

about theorizing how web pages “mean”Slide7

And one of the most useful theories comes from someone who lived and died almost 100 years before the Internet was invented.Slide8

His name is

C

harles

Sanders P

eirce.Slide9

Peirce was a philosopher and logician who worked for the US Geological Survey.

He wondered how the raw input of the senses becomes sensible to people (and animals and plants…)Slide10

He theorized that input comes to “mean” in one of three ways.Slide11

1. Through its resemblance to other things we have already experienced.

Peirce called signs (things that we recognize) that “mean” because they resemble other things we’ve experienced before “icons.”

You see this

And recognize it as a “book” because of its resemblance to other objects in a class that in English we call “books”:Slide12

2. Through its contiguity (placement near) another object in time or space.

Peirce called signs that “mean” through their association in time and space with other signs “indexes”

You hear this:

And recognize it as a siren because of its association with the presence of this:Slide13

3. Through social convention, a sign is associated with a particular meaning

Peirce called signs like these “symbols.” This is the part of his theory that partly overlaps with other theories you may have heard of, like the work of Saussure on language.

You see this:

5

And it represents the concept of “five-ness” to you:

Or you hear this:Slide14

Peirce argued that all signs are understood through relations that are iconic, indexical, or symbolic (or a combination of these).Slide15

But WAIT!!

There’s more.Slide16

Peirce also argued that the different sign relations convey meaning at different levels of comprehension.Slide17

Icons convey “

Firstness

”

A largely unarticulated but felt sense of the presence of meaning (an intuition, an unexplored emotion)

Awwwww

….Slide18

Indices convey “

Secondness

”

An informational, relational sense of presence

Note that an index often combines icons or words (symbols). It is the placement of the sign near danger that makes this sign an index, not the figures that are drawn. The figure itself is an icon of how to properly feed a child to a crocodile.Slide19

Symbols convey “

Thirdness

”

Ideas that are fully articulated and that are understood through the use of other symbols.

“Let’s discuss…”Slide20

In other words, different types of signs convey different types of meanings: emotional, intuitive, directive, rational and argument-based.Slide21

That’s why multimodal messages often have so much power: they can “hit you” at a lot of different levels of your being and expand your full understanding of something intellectually and emotionally.Slide22

Multimodal texts provide a more complete and authentic experience of a topic as well. They not only “hit you” at a lot of different levels of cognition, those levels SUPPORT each other.

But WAIT!

There’s still more!Slide23

For this

r

eason, multimodality is a Godsend to:

struggling readersstudents who speak English as a second or third language (ELLs) even to proficient readers who are being presented a complex topic for which they have little or weak prior knowledge.

They can lend readers vital clues to the meaning of texts and fill-in missing “holes” in their understanding.Slide24
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That’s right. Multimodality is Da Bomb, too.