x

Children’s perceptions of multimodal texts (W16.1)

After a project that used the complex picturebook The Red Tree with a class of 9- and 10–year-old bilingual children to develop inference and deduction, the teacher, Leanne, and Jane, an adviser, asked the children to define a multimodal text:

When asked how they would explain to a younger reader how to read a complex picture book, their explanations of the process showed sophisticated understanding of how these texts work:

Extract from The most wonderful adventure… going beyond the literal, by Jane Bednall and Leanne Cranston in English 4–11 Spring, 2008.

Reference

Shaun Tan (2012) The Red Tree. Sydney, Aus.: Lothian Children’s Books. ISBN 9780734411372.

x

Teachers’ experience of using digital technology at home and school (W16.4).

Graham (2006) interviewed three class teachers/language co-coordinators about their use of digital technology in the classroom. She revisited them in 2012 when two of them, Chris and Alan had changed schools and were now assistant head teachers as well as class teachers (the third had left teaching). In 2006 Chris owned a mobile phone using it to text and for calls. She had been given a school laptop, was using it to research information for school but hated buying things on the internet. She did not perceive herself to be competent in digital worlds and was not prepared to spend time in digital worlds outside the classroom. However, she was prepared to invest time in bringing digital technology into the classroom:

In her new school, Chris is on the management team and encourages teachers to use digital technologies in the classroom.

Alan played computer games with his brother from an early age and has continued his interest in games into adult life and owns a games console and Wii. He is completely at ease with digital technologies and enjoys setting up digital systems at home and at school. Now promoted to assistant head teacher in a new school, he is frustrated by established information and communications technology (ICT) provision:

From Graham, L. (2012) Unfolding lives in digital worlds: digikid teachers revisited, in Literacy 46 (3) pp. 133–139.

x Case study: early middle and upper primary

Surveying multimodal text uses at home and at school (16.3)

Queens Road Primary School, in an industrial town in the south east of England, is a school of 325 children, many of whom speak English as an additional language. The school wanted to review its use of digital technology and other multimodal texts in the classroom, so they asked all classes to complete the survey (see Website resource 16.5) about children’s use of the following types of multimodal texts at home and at school:

• comics
• magazines
• newspapers
• television programmes
• computer games
• films/DVDs
• internet texts
• e-mails
• phone texts
• e-books
• books with words and no pictures
• books with pictures
• audio books.

They also asked about ownership of iPhones or iPads.

(See Website resource W16.5 for a copy of the survey.)

The picture of the whole school

Figure W16. 3.1 shows a comparison for the whole school: boys and girls, ages 5–11. The graph is based on percentages of the responses from the total number of children who completed the survey. Of course, these responses only represent the text experience of children in this school. They are not intended to indicate any general trends.

When the teachers reviewed the responses, they noted that the children’s popular cultural home reading of magazines and comics does not figure so highly in the classroom, although the figures for reading newspapers are about the same at home and at school. Understandably, television and computer games are more likely to be used at home than at school, although the figure for using computer games in school is about half that of home use. Only one teacher used computer games as part of the curriculum, so the teachers wondered if the relatively high response might partly be because over half the total number of children at the school have iPhones or iPads and report that they use them mostly for playing games and taking photographs. Screen-based texts on the television and internet seem equally regularly used at school and at home and emails and texts, again, understandably, hardly feature at school. Where children use e-books and audio books at home these are much less common in school, although books, with and without pictures are equally prevalent at home and at school.

Gender differences in multimodal text use

When it comes to looking at gender differences (see Figure W16.3.2), in this school, at least, there seem to be relatively few major differences in multimodal text use between the boys and the girls. More boys than girls read comics, and more girls than boys read magazines and newspapers. Television viewing is almost the same between boys and girls with the boys slightly higher and where 96% of the boys play computer games, the number of girls reporting playing games is 73%. There are few major differences in the use of all other types of text between boys and girls. (These figures again are based on percentages of the total responses to the survey.)

There were some differences between the age groups but more revealing was that it seems that the particular class teacher’s planning for using multimodal texts – both on screen and off – is a key factor in whether the children’s home expertise is fully built on in the classroom. (See Figures W16.3. 3, W16.3. 4, W16.3. 5, W16.3. 6, W16.3.7 and W16.3. 8.)1

The children’s home comic, magazine and newspaper reading remains quite constant from ages 5–11, although there is a rise in comic and magazine reading in the middle and upper primary years. Similarly, the younger children seem to have the opportunity to read comics in the classroom but in the middle primary years this declines, picking up a little in upper primary.

Screen viewing

Children’s home viewing of television remains constantly high but, particularly in the early years, there is significantly less reported television use in the classroom, except for the 8–9 year old class where television is reported as watched as frequently in the classroom as at home.

Computer games are again constantly popular at home. At school, the younger children report as much classroom use of computer games but from middle primary the picture varies widely, with the 7–8 year olds using computer games much less; the 8–9 year olds have slightly more opportunities to play computer games at school than at home; the 9–10 year olds hardly ever use computer games in the classroom and the 10–11 year olds have rather more opportunities. The teachers found these differences interesting and it provoked some discussion about whether the children were reporting on the iPhone and iPad use (which might partly account for the higher middle figures) and about the teachers’ own interests and attitudes to digital technology.

Films, DVDs and the internet seem to be viewed equally at home and at school and the teachers confirmed that they all used film and the internet for English and all the other curriculum areas.

Understandably, emails and texts are almost exlcusively used at home, except for an interesting reponse in the 8–9 year olds’ class where texts seem to be frequently used at school. Once again, this may be a feature of iPhone/iPad use, but the class teacher was very keen to look into this response.

Reading materials

Except for the 8–9 year old and 9–10 year old classes, most reading using e-books was confined to the home. Books with words and no pictures and books with pictures were equally recorded as reading material at home and in the classroom, although the higher use of audio books at home than at school was interesting.

Reviewing this information the teachers decided on the following actions:

• Widen the range of reading material in classrooms to include children’s preferred comics, magazines, audio and e-books.
• Set up staff training sessions to look at how computer games might be used in the curriculum (particularly as so many girls also report playing computer games. See Figure W16.3.2 ).
• Plan to use e-mails and texting as part of English teaching.

Notes

1. Each graph represents percentages of the number of responses for that class.