iPad Animations: Powerful Multimodal Practices for Adolescent Literacy and Emotional Language

Abstract

In an age of mobile technologies, digital animation creation can be an important tool for teaching adolescents how to communicate emotions multimodally. This article draws on appraisal theory and original research to illustrate the power of digital animation for multimodal literacy learning. Students from a culturally diverse cohort were taught how to interpret emotions in animated films and produced 2‐D cartoon animations using drawings with an iPad application and stylus. The findings show that impassioned multimodal communication is enhanced by knowledge of how feelings produce different facial expressions, gestures, body movements, and physiological changes in characters that are often exaggerated to powerful effect in animations. This includes an ability to invoke different intensities of emotions. The research has significant implications for engaging adolescents in the multimodal communication of emotions and feelings through vocabulary, images, and body language.

A Metalanguage for Learning: Rebalancing the Cognitive with the Socio-Material

“…The latter we describe as multimodal literacy. Following Jewitt and Kress (2003), we focus on the multimodal meaning-making in multiliteracies learning and use their term "multimodal literacy" (O'Halloran and Lim 2011;van Leeuwen 2017;Mills and Unsworth 2018) to draw attention to the codified set of knowledge and skills as well as a sensitivity to semiotic choices in the interpretation and creation of multimodal artefacts (Lim 2021a).…”

Multimodal Language of Attitude in Digital Composition

“…Multimodal appraisal analysis was used to analyze the representation of attitude in students’ self-authored comics (see Table 3). We have previously demonstrated this original approach to systematize how student attitudes were expressed in multimodal ways in students’ self-authored digital texts (Mills et al, 2017; Mills & Unsworth, 2018). The deductive coding framework applied Martin and White’s (2005) broad categories of affect, judgment, and appreciation and relevant elements of multimodal design, including speech bubbles, thought bubbles, narrative text, facial expressions, images, movement, gestures, and color.…”

“…Research of the language of appraisal has become increasingly important internationally across a range of fields, such as communication studies, educational linguistics, and social semiotics (Chen, 2010; Hood, 2006; Swain, 2012). Teaching students how to communicate nuances of attitude is internationally significant given the reported underpreparedness of educators in many countries to address grammatical knowledge (Hudson & Walmsley, 2005), and in particular, knowledge of evaluative meanings in multimodal semiotics (Mills & Unsworth, 2018).…”

“…While research on multimodal comic production in education has pointed to the usefulness of comics and graphic novels to support the English curriculum (Maughan, 2016; Norton, 2003; Schwarz, 2006; Versaci, 2001), such research has not extended to comic writing, nor to understanding how student writing could be strengthened by instruction concerning the emotive, ethical, and aesthetic choices available to authors across modes (Mills & Unsworth, 2018). Communicating sophisticated attitudinal meanings in visual texts is an underresearched yet important life skill for contemporary students who participate in image-based, digital communication ecologies (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006; Unsworth, 2015).…”

Composing Across Media for Rhetorical and Idiosyncratic Purposes: Text‐Based Writing and Digital Multimodal Composing

“…In Johnson and Kendrick (2017), a refugee participant expressed feelings about struggles in his life through music in his multimodal product. Additionally, adolescent students in Mills and Unsworth (2018) attempted to express their emotions through their animations created through iPads. Adolescents in Smith (2018) explored several emotions and "wanted their audience to also experience those feelings" (p. 197) using their digital multimodal products as a platform to deliver their emotions to the targeted audience.…”