The theorization of multimodality in academic scholarship is disconnected from how it is conceptualized by children. To bridge this gap, we analyzed 75 interviews with children about their digital video making. Analysis of their responses demonstrates children's socially-embedded, age-specific understandings of how modes operate, as well as when…

In recent years, research in multimodality has established the benefits of using multiple semiotic modes like image, sound, and text in digital second language (L2) communication. However, researchers have yet to investigate how L2 learners make meaning through embodied modes--or gestures and facial expressions. Grounded in the social semiotic…

The Patch workshop explores creative/critical analyses that can map the collectively relevant topoi of semiosis in linguistic texts according to the three ecologies as articulated by Félix Guattari. As creative pedagogues both in service and critical of creative economics, we valourize a generative practice, one that results in successive creative…

It has long been acknowledged that immigrant children who are originally exposed to home languages become rapidly socialized into using only English. Although many children ultimately develop receptive skills in their home language, they often become English dominant and rarely have the opportunity for literacy development. There is also a common…

An ethics of youth media production is the interplay of identities, media literacy, and modality that shape the environment within which young people produce media, yet how "voice" is fostered and/or constrained in these environments could still be explored more fully. This paper stems from a larger qualitative study of how youth created…

Drawing upon a social semiotic perspective, this article examines the argumentative discourse of "Media Bites" videos: http://griid.org/category/media-bites/. Each of these videos instructively exposes how the advertising discourse of various companies is articulated when promoting well-known products in their commercials. This article focuses on…

Disney videos are used across the US as important materials for teaching language arts and literacy in elementary schools. However, how pupils make meaning of the videos has not been sufficiently investigated in educational research. Twenty-five third-grade pupils were taught comprehension skills using "Sleeping Beauty." The students created their…

Research has identified the value of learners using technology to construct their own representations of science concepts. In this study, we investigate how learners, such as preservice elementary teachers, design and make a narrated animation to represent their science knowledge. The type of animation exemplified is called a "Slowmation"…