Leveraging adolescents' multimodal literacies to promote dialogic discussions of literature in one secondary English classroom
Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: Although researchers have identified the positive relationship between students' academic literacy learning and dialogic discussion—talk about texts in which students build on and transform each other's ideas—this pattern of discourse occurs rarely in most secondary English classrooms. Promising research on the varied multimodal literacies in which adolescents are engaged in their out-of-school lives suggests that these literacies may inform academic literacy practices such as dialogic discussions of literature, but little is known about how such literacies might be leveraged to make academic literacy instruction more effective. This dissertation study identified ways in which students' out-of-school and multimodal literacies could be leveraged to shape their participation in dialogic discussions of literature in one secondary English classroom. To that end, this study comprised an empirical investigation of students' participation in dialogic discussion after completing either collaborative multimodal or collaborative unimodal projects, and traced focal students' participation across small group and whole class discourse contexts to investigate whether and how student learning was facilitated through multimodality. Drawing on classroom discourse analysis and ethnographic data collection techniques, this comparative study of two sections of one 12th-grade English course explored the centrality of semiotic mediation and transmediation as these processes supported students' participation in dialogic discussions. Findings support the use of collaborative multimodal instructional activities to facilitate students' internalization of dialogic discourse norms and scaffold students' participation in discussions across discourse contexts.
Author: James S. Chisholm
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W50410872