Rethinking literacy: communication,representation and text

In this article I want to consider shifts in the use of the word ‘literacy’ and the implications for classroom work with texts, particularly the implications of the rapid and radical emergence of new relationships between different modes of representation and communication ( Kress, 2003; Raney, 1996; Unsworth, 2001 ). My concern is to argue that any approach to classroom literacy needs not only to recognise the new forms of text which children meet every day but to give multimodal texts a firm place in the curriculum. Further, if the text experience of young learners about these new combinations of modes of representation are to be realised in the classroom, then we need a framework for describing those texts. An approach which takes account of the rhetoric of design may be a way forward.