Chapter 3: Using Multimodal Practices To Support Students’ Access To Academic Language and Content in Spanish and English

Literacy entails making sense of written symbols whose meaning is created and derived from social practices (Barton, 1994). In order to become literate in society, students must navigate the social context in which the text is found, the text’s purpose, and what they bring to the text, such as their own background, language, and literacy experiences (Walsh, 2010). Multimodal literacy honors this complexity and adds to it by acknowledging the many ways that knowledge is represented and deployed in texts through different modalities (e.g., image, words, sound, and movement) (Jewitt & Kress, 2003). To adequately make meaning of texts and social contexts in which a range of modalities is used to communicate information, students must become competent users and producers of multimodal texts themselves, understanding how each modality contributes separately and simultaneously to construct meaning (Walsh, 2008).