Listening to teachers talk about multimodality and multimodal texts: considerations for the national English curriculum

Multimodal texts are an integral part of children’s lives. Rapid advancements in media and mobile technologies have increasingly expanded children’s capability to view, share, design, and produce multimodal texts. However, Australia’s updated English curriculum falls short of offering teachers a metalanguage to help children understand the complex ways linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, and spatial modes work together to convey meaning. This article reports qualitative research on teachers talking about multimodal texts within their pedagogy and literacy practice. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews with eight early years and primary Australian teachers. Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is the analytic framework utilised in the research. From teachers’ talk, findings show that if children are to be effective multimodal text users, analysts, designers, and creators, the curriculum should not privilege particular modes and their associated metalanguage but provide teachers with a metalanguage for all modes of meaning-making.