This article presents a tripartite framework for analyzing multimodal texts. The three analytical perspectives presented include: (1) perceptual, (2) structural, and (3) ideological analytical processes. Using Anthony Browne's picturebook Piggybook as an example, assertions are made regarding what each analytical perspective brings to the interpretation of multimodal texts and how these perspectives expand readers' interpretive repertoires. Drawing on diverse fields of inquiry, including semiotics, art theory, visual grammar, communication studies, media literacy, visual literacy and literary theory, the article suggests an expansion of the strategies and analytical perspectives readers being to multimodal texts and visual images. Each perspective is presented as necessary but insufficient in and of itself to provide the necessary foundation for comprehending texts. It is through an expansion of the interpretive strategies and perspectives that readers bring to a multimodal text, focusing on visual, textual, and design elements that readers will become more proficient in their interpretive processes.
The texts that adolescents encounter today are often multimodal, meaning they incorporate a variety of modes, including visual images, hypertext, and graphic design elements along with written text. Expanding the perspectives readers use to make sense of the multimodal texts is an important aspect of comprehension instruction. Moving beyond the traditional cognitive strategies often incorporated in instruction frameworks for comprehending written texts, this article presents three additional perspectives for comprehending visual images. Examples from each perspective are included to help middle and high school teachers expand the strategies students draw from to interpret and understand visual images and multimodal texts.
Research methods and analytical approaches that support inquiry in the social sciences need to respond to continual changes in the theoretical frameworks, research methods, and technologies used to support data collection and analysis in contemporary research frameworks. This article describes a variation of qualitative content analysis, termed ‘multimodal content analysis’, that draws upon previous iterations of qualitative content analysis, interpretivist research designs, deductive and inductive reasoning, qualitative data collection and analysis methods, and theories of multimodality for conceptualizing and analyzing a selected corpus of multimodal phenomena. In addition, the analysis of selected commercial wine labels is presented to offer researchers an example of multimodal content analysis to guide future research and open up a dialogue focusing on the potential advantages and challenges to researching multimodal phenomena.
Wordless picturebooks may be better defined by what they do contain – visually rendered narratives – rather than what they do not contain. This column challenges traditional ways of looking at wordless picturebooks and offers a few approaches for integrating wordless picturebooks into a wider range of classrooms, preschool through middle school.
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