Welcome
Welcome to this online version of the study guide for Introducing Multimodality. Here you will find full colour images from inside the book, an indexed glossary, extra links to online resources, and an additional section of key further reading for addressing the issue of ‘what next?’ after using the guide. Developed to support your understanding of multimodality and to help you to design your own multimodal study, you can use this site as a guide to reading the book and engaging with the issues raised by it, or as a standalone resource forming the basis for a short course.
The study guide is designed to help you to:
- Engage critically with the notion of multimodality;
- Recognize the similarities and differences in theoretical and methodological positions;
- Identify and describe how multimodality has been taken up in systemic functional linguistics, social semiotics and conversation analysis;
- Reflect on the potentialities and challenges of frameworks that adopt multimodal concepts in combination with other methods;
- Assess the quality of multimodal research, notably aptness of fit between research questions, theories and methods in multimodality;
- Engage critically with the process of designing a multimodal study and support you to design your own multimodal study.
How to use this self-study guide
The study guide consists of seven units. Each unit is a study companion to its corresponding chapter in this book:
Unit 1. Accompanies Chapter 1, Navigating a diverse field, and is designed to help you to engage critically with the notion of multimodality, assess the centrality of multimodality in a study, and position yourself in the diverse field of multimodality.
Unit 2. Accompanies Chapter 2, Why engage with multimodality?, and is designed to help you to interrogate the notion of multimodality, and to make a case for engaging with multimodality.
Unit 3. Accompanies Chapter 3, Systemic functional linguistics (SFL), and is designed to help you to get to grips with how multimodality has been taken up in SFL, to familiarize yourself with its key principles and concepts, and to try out some basic SFL methods of analysis.
Unit 4. Accompanies Chapter 4, Social semiotics, and is designed to help you to explore with a social semiotic approach to multimodality, to familiarize yourself with its key principles and concepts and to try out some basic social semiotic analytical methods.
Unit 5. Accompanies Chapter 5, Conversation analysis (CA), and is designed to help you to understand how multimodality has been taken into CA, to familiarize yourself with the key principles and concepts of CA and to try out some basic CA methods of transcription and analysis.
Unit 6. Accompanies Chapter 6, Five more approaches to multimodality, and is designed to help you to engage with the possibilities for combining multimodal approaches with other methods, to consider the potentials and limitations of doing so, and to familiarize yourself with five such approaches.
Unit 7. Accompanies Chapter 7, Designing a multimodal study, and is designed to help you design a multimodal study and to walk you through the key aspects of that process: from reflecting on the most apt approach for your study, clarifying your research focus and questions, collecting research materials, assessing methods of transcription, to the ethical considerations of multimodal research.
Each unit sets out a clear learning objective and what it will help you to do. All units include:
- A chapter overview, with chapter topics and summary
- A set of study questions
- Exercises
- Tips
- Suggested resources
It is suggested that you work through the self-study guide units in order and read the accompanying chapter as you tackle each unit. The guide also includes a summary of tips for designing your own study, recommended general further reading and a glossary of terms.
