Interpreting old texts with new tools: digital multimodal composition for a high school reading assignment
English Teaching: Practice & Critique
ISSN: 1175-8708
Article publication date: 25 October 2021
Issue publication date: 17 May 2022
Abstract
Purpose
Research on nonschool settings suggests young people benefit from digital multimodal composition. Less is known about how digital composing can support students as they interpret required literary class texts. To understand the potential benefits and challenges of digitally composing for literary analysis, design interviews with two high school students were conducted to examine their processes as they designed digital multimodal compositions to interpret Anglo-Saxon poems. Grounded in the social semiotic theory of multimodality, this study aims to examine how students engaged in literary analysis and interpretive digital composition within secondary ELA.
Design/methodology/approach
Qualitative classroom data were collected through digital means over a six-week period: a whole-class student survey, focal student semistructured design interviews, emails, field notes, analytic memos and student-created digital artifacts.
Findings
Students’ print-based literary engagements and digital multimodal composition processes were mutually shaped. Additionally, digital multimodal composition offered entry points into challenging print-based literary texts, resulting in understandings enacted across multiple forms of mediation.
Research limitations/implications
The study focused on one cycle of multimodal composition. Additional studies of students’ digital multimodal composition processes in ELA classrooms over time could be beneficial to the field.
Practical implications
The study identifies an approach to digital multimodal composition that may help teachers address and integrate core disciplinary objectives.
Originality/value
This study contributes to scholarship concerned with how “new” technologies and “old” literacies co-exist in contexts requiring students to engage in expanded communication modes alongside specific academic literacies.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Mr Williams and all the students who participated in this study. The authors would also like to thank the editorial team and the reviewers for their thoughtful feedback.
Citation
Higgs, J.M. and Kim, G.M. (2022), "Interpreting old texts with new tools: digital multimodal composition for a high school reading assignment", English Teaching: Practice & Critique, Vol. 21 No. 2, pp. 128-142. https://doi.org/10.1108/ETPC-07-2020-0079
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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