关于举办第二届广外-香港理工多元识读论坛通知

主办：广东省高校外语教师教学发展示范中心

承办：香港理工大学英文系

广东外语外贸大学教师发展中心

广东外语外贸大学外国语言学及应用语言学研究中心

附件3：

主旨发言摘要及嘉宾介绍                

1、Making Sense: A Grammar of Multimodal Meaning                                                                          

Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope                                                            

In recent years, multimodality has become a focal point for the work of linguists, literacy educators and arts/design scholars, among others. One of the principal touchstones for the development of a theory of multimodality has been the rise of new, digital media. Here, among other significant developments, we see the proliferation of still and moving image as modes of expression, displacing or augmenting messages that would once have been expressed only in oral or written language. At the same time, we witness a dramatic extension of the sites of writing and reading, and in new or hybrid genres.                                                            

This paper sketches in outline form a grammar of multimodality, addressing both the comparabilities and irreducible differences in the processes of meaning across different modes. As well as offering a synthesis of the literature on linguistic and visual modes, the paper will examine modes that have to date received relatively little attention in the literature on multimodality, particularly audio, gestural and spatial modes. In the light of developments in new media we also wish to highlight the substantial differences between the grammar of speaking and the grammar of writing in order to analyze the grammatical peculiarities of a proliferating range of hybrid forms of writing—including for instance, instant messaging, comments, and annotations.                                                            

In our grammar of multimodality, we propose five semiotic metafunctions or levels at which people ‘make sense’. Here, we revise Halliday’s three semiotic metafunctions and extend these with two more. All meaning-making, across all modes, operates at five levels, with five purposes. We refer to things, events, processes and abstractions (Halliday’s ‘ideational’ function). We dialogue, with ourselves and others (Halliday’s ‘interpersonal’ function). We structure our meanings in ways which are both conventional and always innovative to the extent that every re-making is uniquely modulated (Halliday’s ‘textual’ function). We situate our meanings in contexts, or at least find that they are situated by default (what we call a ‘contextual’ function). And we intend when we position and or encounter meanings in webs of intention or agency (a metafunction we call ‘interest’).                                                            

The presentation concludes with an introduction to our work developing the multimodal ‘social knowledge’, digital writing and e-learning space, Scholar.                                                            

Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope                                                            

This workshop will further explore the theoretical themes introduced in our plenary lecture, with particular reference to learning and assessment practices in our Scholar digital writing space. Digitally-mediated environments offer a wide range of potentials for learning design and delivery, which range from reproduction of traditional pedagogical practices in digital form, to genuine innovations. The workshop will trace the dimensions of new media, contrasting its characteristic technical processes and social relationships with the mass media of the twentieth century. It argues that new media not only afford a ‘new learning’; we also require pedagogical reform in order for education to remain apt to contemporary social conditions in which new media play a defining role. The workshop will introduce participants to the web-based Scholar digital writing environment. In this focus on practice, we will have two areas of emphasis—the creation of multimodal digital texts, and emerging, technology-mediated approaches to writing assessment, as well as knowledge represented in writing. Please bring a laptop computer if you have one with you, and we’ll give you some hands-on multimodal writing and assessment experiences!                                                                          

3、Transforming Language and Learning From and For the ‘Good’: An Axiological Perspective on Multiliteracies and FL Education                                                                          

Mark Evan Nelson                                                            

Since its inception more than two decades ago, the multiliteracies framework has gained greatly in recognition and significance in many parts of the globe. Concurrently, though, broad expansion of neoliberal educational policies and restrictive assessment regimes continues, along with other important factors, to challenge the meaningful, coherent implementation of multiliteracies pedagogies -- ostensibly frustrating its original aim of engendering positive, fulfilling “social futures” for all. Yet, the presenter will argue, the existence of such salient tensions between what multiliteracies may or may not be, entail, and imply is really fortuitous, actually very much for the ‘good’, to the extent that these tensions may prompt continued, situated consideration of what multiliteracies should mean, i.e. its ‘value’. Value, as a semiotic and axiological construct, helps to illuminate vital contingencies between what a thing is understood to be and its perceived aesthetic and ethical properties, i.e. what does or does not make it ‘good’, to whom and how and why. The presenter will demonstrate how attention to value may activate new critical potentials for understanding the nature(s) and place(s) of multiliteracies pedagogies, in concept and practice, going forward. The practical discussion will relate especially to the teaching and learning of foreign languages (FL), an educational domain comparatively little influenced as yet by multiliteracies approaches.                                                                                                                                        

4、Comparing image-language relations in illustrated literary narratives and movie adaptations: Exploring different interpretive possibilities of ostensibly the same story                                                                          

Len Unsworth

Literary narratives are increasingly being re-contextualized in different formats.  Well-known novels are appearing in ‘graphic novel’ form, and these, as well as picture books are frequently adapted as movies. The experience of literary narratives for children of the 21^st century is of multiple versions of the same story in different presentation formats.  While in some cases the book and movie versions of the stories are obviously very different, for a significant number of picture books and literary narratives for children and young people, the characters and events of the story versions, and often the language, remain very much the same, and the moving image representations of characters in animated movie versions also essentially maintain the character depiction of the paper media story versions. But the interpersonal or interactive aspects of the of character depiction in terms of focalization, social distance, vertical and horizontal perspective are often very different in the different story versions, resulting in significant variation in the construction of interpretive possibilities.  This presentation draws on systemic functional linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) and related descriptions of the meaning-making resources of images (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001/2006; Painter, Martin, & Unsworth, 2013) to show how analyses of image-language relations in book and movie versions of literary narratives can illuminate these variations in interpretive possibilities.  Indicative analyses will be illustrated of Felix and Alexander (Denton, 1985), a prize-winning picture book and animated movie adaptation; a children’s novel, Coraline (Gaiman, 2002) – first re-contextualized as a graphic novel (Gaiman & Russell, 2008) and then as an animated movie (Selick, 2009), and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (Kafka, 1915/2004), as a graphic novel (Kuper, 2003) and associated movie version.  Implications will be drawn for multimodal discourse analysis, new literary studies, and teaching multimodality in the school language curriculum.                                                                          

Denton, T. (1985). Felix and Alexander. Oxford: Oxford University Press.                                                            

Gaiman, N. (2002). Coraline. London: Bloomsbury.                                                            

Gaiman, N., & Russell, P. C. (2008). Coraline: The Graphic Novel. London: Bloomsbury.                                                            

Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. (2004). An introduction to functional grammar (3 ed.). London: Arnold.                                                            

Kafka, F. (1915/2004). The Metamorphosis. New York: Bantam/Random House.                                                            

Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2001/2006). Reading Images: The grammar of visual design (2 ed.). London: Routledge.                                                            

Kuper, P. (2003). The Metamorphosis. New York: Three Rivers Press.                                                            

Painter, C., Martin, J. R., & Unsworth, L. (2013). Reading Visual Narratives: Image Analysis of Children's Picture Books. London: Equinox.                                                            

Selick, H. (Writer). (2009). Coraline. In C. Jennings, Linden, H., Mechanic, B. Sandell, M. Selick, H (Producer). Universal City, USA: Focus Pictures.                                                            

Unsworth, L. (2008). Multiliteracies and Metalanguage: Describing image/text relations as a resource for negotiating multimodal texts. In D. Leu, Corio, J., Knobel, M., Lankshear, C. (Ed.), Handbook of Research on New Literacies (pp. 377- 405). New Jersey: Erlbaum.