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Writing, digital culture and English curriculum

journal contribution
posted on 2007-01-01, 00:00 authored by Catherine BeavisCatherine Beavis
In their out-of-school lives, young people are immersed in rich and complex digital worlds, characterised by image and multimodality. Computer games in particular present young people with specific narrative genres and textual forms: contexts in which meaning is constructed interactively and drawing explicitly on a wide range of design elements including sound, image, gesture, symbol, colour and so on. As English curriculum seeks to address the changing nature of literacy, challenges are raised, particularly with respect to the ways in which multimodal texts might be incorporated alongside print based forms of literacy. Questions focus both on the ways in which such texts might be created, studied and assessed, and on the implications of the introduction of such texts for print based literacies. This paper explores intersections between writing and computer games within the English classroom, from a number of junior secondary examples. In particular it considers tensions that arise when young people use writing to recreate or respond to multimodal forms. It explores ways in which writing is stretched and challenged by enterprises such as these, ways in which students utilise and adapt print based modes to represent multimodal forms of narrative, and how teachers and curriculum might respond. Consideration is given to the challenges posed to teaching and assessment by bringing writing to bear as the medium of analysis of, and response to, multimodal texts.

History

Journal

L1 Educational studies in language and literature

Volume

7

Issue

4

Pagination

23 - 44

Publisher

Kluwer Academic Publishers

Location

Dordrecht, Netherlands

ISSN

1567-6617

eISSN

1573-1731

Language

eng

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Copyright notice

International Association for the Improvement of Mother Tongue Education

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