Multimedia and author motivation in storytelling

Malinowski, D., & Nelson, M. E. (2011). What now for language in a multimedia world? In C. M. L. Ho, K. T. Anderson, & A. P. Leong (Eds.), Transforming literacies and language: Multimodality and literacy in the new media age (pp. 9-22). London: Continuum.

Background

Communication in the modern world has become more infused with various other media such as icons, images and videos. As a result, some linguists have argued that the conceptual boundaries of language should change to include these media. The present authors, however, suggest that there is a need to draw a distinction between language and other forms of communication such as images and gesture.

Aims

The research aimed to look at how, in multimodal communication, the meaning in one mode might affect the meaning in another. The authors also wanted to consider how the layers of meaning in multimodal communication could be described and analysed, and what aspects of awareness and knowledge on the part of the creators may have an impact on these layers of meaning.

Sample

The main study looked at the digital story-telling of nine Japanese undergraduate English majors at a private university in Tokyo. However, this article selects one page of one student’s work as its focus.

Method

The authors engaged in a four-month case study of digital storytelling. Participants were involved in creating personal stories from five to nine minutes in length that integrated still and video imagery, music, recorded spoken language, and text. This was done in the context of an English language elective course. Data collected included observational field notes, participant profile surveys, reflective journals, artifacts, semi-structured interviews and the completed digital stories. The article uses the data collected from one of the students to help understand the intended meanings of one page of her digital story.

Findings

The authors show how the different aspects of the page under study combine to present the writer’s message. The picture of a window, highlighted by an outline, and the superimposed text ‘My Door’ combine to represent the desired image behind the writer’s own story.

Implications

The authors posited that the centrality of language in human communication would continue but this should not preclude mastering the intricacies of multimodal meaning-making with its varied and elaborate multimodal constructions of meaning.

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