Core Concepts from Multiliteracies for Language Teachers in Contemporary Times

Abstract

First paragraph: Three nine-year-old boys are sitting on a porch in urban Canada. They are engaged in a multiplayer session of Terraria, a video game that purports to combine the creativity and freedom of a sandbox environment with the strategic requirements of an action game. Each child is holding his own device—an iPod Touch, an iPad, an android tablet. Their eyes are fixed on their own screens, sometimes scanning over to the others’, fingers busily pushing and swiping as they build biomes. During the game, one of the boys opens an Internet browser, types in a term from the game, and the children collectively research how to find an element they want. Through the search results they read blog posts from other players and add their own information to the mix. All the while they are playing, the boys are talking away to each other. If you were to listen in and focus on the discourse, you’d hear all seven of Michael Halliday’s functions of language: instrumental (“I want to build…”), regulatory (“Do this here and…), interactional (“Let’s…”), personal (“Watch me when…”), informative (“When you go here…”), but especially heuristic (“What happens when you…”) and imaginative (“In this world…”). Given such events, literacy research has been grappling with questions like, what is literacy in this new communicational landscape (e.g., is video gaming a literacy practice?) and what are the implications of the response to this question for education?