Literature and Multimodality

This chapter examines the changing nature of literacy by analysing different kinds of multimodal literary texts—graphic novels, digital storytelling, transmedia storytelling—and showing how they are developing new narratives which are nonlinear, participatory, and gamelike. The writers argue that these types of text are more accessible to lower level language learners because the meaning of the text is delivered through visuals and sound as well as the written word. They argue that literacy now involves the ability to interpret layers of meaning generated by the combination of media types involved in multimedia texts, and the ability to understand how visuals and sound are involved in meaning-making is as important as interpreting the written word. These are also forms of ‘language’ which language learners need to cope with.