Multimodality: Literacy, Multiliteracy and Intercultural Literacy

In the past the overwhelming perspective of literacy was that it was basically a cognitive act, including the mental procedures of reading and composing. Literacy was viewed as a "to a great extent altered, individualistic and mental capacity"

(Atkins, 2001, p. 11). Writing was seen frequently to be both motivated by and

joined by symbolism; yet writing remained the centre (Emig, 1983). Thus, reading was comprehended to be joined by visual symbolism; however, reading remained the core interest. Being literate basically included having the skills to interpret and encode, and both skills were comprehended as mental operations.

In any case, now literacy is being comprehended to be a social practice (Slater, 1997). Rather than being found exclusively in the head, it is comprehended to be situated in social settings, and, similar to pictures, rather than being situated in writings themselves, it is comprehended to be situated in connections. A prior semiotic methodology that concentrated on texts alone has been supplanted by an extended social semiotic literacy that is grounded in social, including historical, settings (Buckingham, 1993). Literacy is seen as active. It is seen to change after some time because of changing utilizations of technology and social distractions, and, as visual symbolism, to be significantly political as in it is utilized at each level with the goal to characterize and control the direction of events.

Much late work in the field of literacy, especially the New Literacy Studies, has seen a move far from the thought that Literacy is 'a solitary thing with a major L and a solitary Y' (Sugden & Wilson, 2001) and towards an appreciation about its multifaceted nature and social situatedness. Literacy, then, changes from setting to setting, offering ascend to the thought of literacies. Barton and Hamilton (2000, pp. 10-11) distinguish three courses in which the term must be seen as plural:

firstly, literacy practices may include distinctive media and semiotic frameworks, (for example, movies or PCs); secondly, practices in various cultures and languages can be viewed as various literacies; and thirdly, literacy practices might be connected with specific areas of life, (for example, scholastic or work environment literacy).

While quite a bit of Barton and Hamilton's work concentrates on the third of these, the initial two fields have been highlighted by the New London Group (NLG) and others (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Kist, 2004; Unsworth, 2001) who reject conventional print-based literacy instructional method with its emphasis on 'formalized, monolingual, monocultural, and rule-governed types of language' (NLG, 2000, p. 9). Rather, it is contended that there is a requirement for a teaching method of multiliteracies which considers both 'our culturally and linguistically different and progressively globalized societies' and also 'the expanding

assortment of content structures connected with information and multimedia technologies’ (NLG, 2000, p. 9).

Barton and Hamilton's first point with respect to media assorted qualities is subsequently like the NLG's second, while their second, linguistic and cultural differing qualities is like the NLG's first. It is assorted qualities of media which has been stressed in long-running exchanges of visual literacy (Sinatra, 1986) and, all the more as of late, discussions of PC, electronic or hypertext literacies (Dudfield, 1999; Kern, 2006; Selber, 2004; Warschauer, 1999, 2003; Wray, 2004). So, from a focus on culturally bound national print literacy, we have moved to what Tsui (2005, p. 42), alluding to IT and language, calls 'worldwide literacy skills'. On the off chance that, as Freire and Macedo (1987) have recommended, literacy is about 'reading the word' as well as 'reading the world', the capacity to "read" only one country or one group must be seen as extremely restricting.

In the event that single-mode, single-language, single-culture literacy has ever been completely adequate - a far from being obviously true point-unmistakably it is presently deficient for expanding quantities of individuals in our interconnected world. In its place, we require what Canagarajah (2003, p. 11), talking about the developing universe of multilingual and mixed textuality, calls 'fluid literacies'. The estimation of this analogy is in adding to the pluralisation already intrinsic in

"literacies" the thought of fluidity, which recommends not just leakage across over perpetually porous limits between countries, groups, languages and societies, however the likelihood of blending and hybridisation.

In language teaching, late years have seen a noteworthy move far from the model of communicative competence, with its focus on mimicking native speaker models throughout a long apprenticeship whose verging on unachievable objective was a consistent mix into a settled and solid 'target culture'. In its place, we discover a valorisation of the thought of intercultural (communicative) ability, now a noteworthy objective of foreign instruction, prominently in the European context (Kohonen, 2007, pp. 3-4 & Starkey, 2007, p. 57) additionally, for instance, in Australia and the USA.

Intercultural competence de-accentuates the gaining of a native-like identity and empowers the learner to cut out a 'third place' (Kramsch, 1993) from which he or

she will have the capacity to arrange and intervene between the native and target cultures. These cultures, a long way from being lessened to the four Fs regular of numerous communicative courses - foods, fairs, folklore and statistical facts- (Kramsch, 1991, p. 218) composes of small "c" culture in US outside language reading material)- are seen as developing groups of discourse and practice, dependably in flux, which welcome broad and concentrated investigation.

Besides, in the process the learner will come to investigate his or her own way of life as much as any foreign culture. Consequently, intercultural communicative competence includes an arrangement of abilities and practices which are especially arranged in the muddled real life of cultural streams and blends.

Encouraging intercultural competence among students is a reaction to our expanding need to identify with, comprehend, sympathize interact with otherness, both inner and outer (Byram, 1997; Corbett, 2003; Kramsch, 1998; Phipps &

Gonzalez, 2004).

Intercultural competence, proposed by Crozet and Liddicoat (1999), requires no less than three phases of preparing. Firstly, they contend, culture 'is not obtained through osmosis' but rather 'should be taught unequivocally' (p. 120), implying that students' consideration must be attracted to cultural diagrams and paradigms through examination and investigation. This stage must be trailed by exercises requiring cultural comparison, with the point of helping learners to welcome that every culture, including their own, is 'a substantial but at last a self-assertive build, one of many' (p. 117). These two stages, say Crozet and Liddicoat, are basically readiness for the third phase of intercultural investigation, where the student starts to assemble his or her own 'third place' between his/her first linguaculture and the target linguaculture (p. 118).

There is much shared ground between the goals of intercultural competence, which prepares learners to negotiate between cultures, and multiliteracies, which prepare learners to ‘read’ and ‘understand’ texts from a variety of media, linguistic and cultural sources. The connection is implicit in the comments of Henry Giroux who, referring to his concept of border crossing, notes that:

. . . citizens need to be multiliterate in ways that not only allow them access to new information and media-based technologies, but also enable them to be border crossers capable of engaging, learning from, understanding, and being tolerant of and responsible to matters of difference and otherness. (Giroux, 2006, p. 165)

An initial attempt to represent these changes in language pedagogy and literacy in diagrammatic form might produce the kind of model shown in Figure 2.1.

Figure 2.1. A Model of Intercultural Literacies

Here, parallel moves in both areas are seen as leading to the notion of intercultural literacies which, situated on the common ground between them, opens up a much more (multi)modally and (multi)culturally fluid concept of literacies.