Graded readers, simplified versions of literature and other texts at graduated levels of difficulty, are widely employed in contexts of foreign language pedagogy and are widely considered to be a form of written-language input ostensibly suitable for a wide array of developmental stages. However, the efficacy of graded readers is not unchallenged, among which criticisms is that the language in a graded work of literature is, by nature, aesthetically inert and inauthentic, in comparison to the original. Still, from an L2 literacies-development perspective, could one not justifiably accept that aesthetic impoverishment and inauthenticity are reasonable, perhaps also unavoidable, compromises? Practically, what, for example, could a typical intermediate-level learner of EFL be expected to glean from a nineteenth-century English novel? Would the language-learning needs of this learner not be better addressed through engagement with an appropriately graded version of the same novel, facilitating optimally fluent—and, therefore, assumedly more enjoyable and motivating—reading practice? This article reports on research that addressed precisely these questions, focusing specifically on Japanese university students’ involvement with and interaction around George Eliot’s (1861) Silas Marner. Applying comparative textual analysis and qualitative case-study methods, and viewed through a social semiotic conceptual lens, the researchers investigated the relative meaning-making affordances of graded-reader and original versions of the novel and examined turn-by-turn the semiotic work performed by a group of Japanese university students as they collaboratively unpacked this challenging piece of fiction. Findings suggest that the authentic text, however difficult, afforded rich meaning- making possibilities that would have been unavailable through engagement with graded readers. Importantly, too, the results indicate that active peer collaboration, a process that entailed the individual contribution and cooperative synthesis of a diversity of textual and extra-textual semiotic resources, was vital to actualizing these learning opportunities. On the basis of this analysis, the paper concludes with a preliminary argument for the pedagogical efficacy of promoting collaborative dysfluency in L2 literacies education—over and above the individually oriented aim of reading fluency as conventionally defined.

The impact of socio-economic changes and technological advancements is prompting many educational institutions to re-think the processes of planning, designing and delivering courses in Higher Education. The effect is a re-emergence of the importance of curriculum design. The aim of this research is to investigate the efficacies and potential applications of graphically 'mapping' the interrelated educational needs, aspirations, concerns, and other vital interests of students, their families, teachers, administrators, employers, and policy-makers, toward increasing the relevance, flexibility, and effectiveness of curricular in all domains of Higher Education. Benefits of increased efficiency, effectiveness, and agility for course planners and managers in all academic domains is anticipated. The paper summarizes the development of a mobile App to motivate such engagement in a collaborative curricular.

This essay looks at the dysfunctional relationship between overall international development assistance and more specific support to the media sector. While the international donor community sees the potential of independent media in developing countries to contribute to societies’ economic and social progress, international development policies rarely have a coherent, integrated approach to the media sector, and foreign assistance often fails to achieve its goal of helping countries create a sustainable, independent media that acts in the interests of society as a whole. Indeed, leaders of many countries have decided that media—and especially unfettered, independent media—is more likely to be an obstacle, at least to their political fortunes, than a support. The author proposes three ways that the international community could improve its work on media development and build stronger political commitment for independent media. First is strengthening country leadership and ownership of media development initiatives. This requires building local knowledge about the role of media in open societies and about how to manage a strong, independent media system. Second is integration of media development work within the broader development agenda, leveraging more of the $135 billion that donors spend annually on official development assistance. Third is improving data, diagnostics, and learning on the media sector, particularly in developing countries, and creating a better understanding of how countrylevel media sectors are evolving, and how they can be best supported.

Creativity and creators themselves have ever been heralded as the pride and hope of us all, daedalean deliverers of the masses from doldrums, dysfunction, disease, and all manner of other ills. How...

In this article, we describe a programme of qualitative research and interpretive analysis around an approach to foreign language pedagogy that aimed to develop learners' symbolic competence through experience with and examination of the of signs in acts of communication. Learners were presented with the problem of visually representing the abstract concepts of envy, excitement, joy and fear as a means of exploring relationships between mode and meaning and how meaning may be transformed as a result of re-presenting ideas in different modal forms. The data set included learners' visual compositions, observational field notes on in-class interaction and transcribed semi-structured interviews and student presentations on their work, all of which were analysed through the interpretive lens of Peircean semiotics, specifically the notion of abduction. Findings suggest that facilitating learners' creative engagement in shifting meaning across representational boundaries of mode can serve to stimulate socio-cognitive processes of abduction, and thereby heighten students' awareness of and connection to unique linguistic resources afforded by the target language.

Over the past few decades, there has been a marked shift away from conceptualizing literacy as a functional skill set toward its recognition, particularly for children and youth, as a social achievement that is buttressed, in part, by access to digital tools and new media. Yet, beyond the mere consumption of multimedia and the mundane assemblage of words, images, and other resources, we ask, “What does a successful multimedia literacy performance look like and how might ‘designful’ multimedia thinking and composition be taught, learned, and assessed?” In addressing these issues, we present a fine-grained description and analysis of the work of a 13-year-old Singaporean named “Jeremy,” who produced a personal digital story of considerable theoretical and practical interest to us as researchers and new literacy scholars. Building on prior research in the field of multiliteracies, we argue that educators (and students) must cultivate their own senses of “semiotic awareness” before meaningful assessment of children’s multimodal design work can be conceived or implemented. We also sketch a preliminary approach to assessing multimodal literacies and explicate a range of interconnected representational possibilities that we expect will prompt a timely and urgent reconsideration of multimodal meaning design in school settings.

Abstract“Multimodality”—literally, the quality of integrating multiple forms or means—is a term that has been taken up by a number of fields over the past few decades (e.g., in medicine) to describe the co‐application of a diversity of diagnostic imaging strategies, and in research into artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and augmented reality to talk about coordinated aspects of multisensory experience within digital environments.

This paper reports on a study, MUSE, which involved Secondary (Grade 7) students in designing and constructing a virtual museum. It presents a description and evaluation of the design and implementation of the technologically-mediated intervention within a language curriculum that emphasizes multimodal meaning-making and expression. Participants' gallery artifacts, interviews, reflections and classroom observations indicated signs of an emergent multimodal awareness with a growing sensitivity to semiotic affordances and constraints. Collaborative learning skills acquired and language learning motivational gains were evident. The investigation identified responsive, adaptive measures in overcoming unanticipated challenges arising from on-the-ground realities and contextual constraints. The study showed the viability, to a certain extent, of innovative technologically-enhanced interventions in reinforcing instructional pedagogy in classroom contexts.