013. Teaching Multiliteracies in the classroom

With the rapid changes in technology and its infiltration into our daily lives, there is a need to re-look at how literacy practices are taught and practiced in the classrooms and make it relevant to the society of today.

The traditional view of literacy that is valued in schools are rooted in linguistics - reading and writing. However, with new technologies being used, its affordances has changed what it means to read. The way information is presented these days is different from before and thus, the way we read has to reflect such changes.

An example that I thought of is the section of graphic stimulus that can be found in most primary levels' examination papers. Pupils have to extract information from a text that has accompanying images. However, more often than not, the images used in the text does not provide additional meaning or information. These texts are usually presented in the form of advertisements, bulletins etc

However, as most of us know, images complement in meaning making in most authentic and functional texts that are used these days. Therefore, the graphic stimulus used in those papers should be an authentic version of how texts are in the 'real world' so that pupils are able to read when multimodal aspects of reading and writing are presented. Thus, schools should also consider teaching pupils to read advertisements and other texts not only in 'paper' form but also in other modes, like moving visuals etc.