Multimodal attitude in digital composition : Appraisal in elementary English

Video making and sharing have the potential to represent attitude in powerful ways and have become everyday literacy practices for many children. Research has only recently attended to the multimodal grammars of attitudinal meaning that characterize filmic media, while providing few examples of the successful teaching of these semiotic principles to elementary students. This article reports original research conducted in two schools over two years with elementary students (ages 9 to 11 years). It examines students' application of semiotic knowledge of the appraisal framework to communicate attitudinal meanings multimodally through film. Attitudinal meanings in the appraisal framework are categorized as affect, judgment, or appreciation, and can be communicated through discourse and multimodal texts. The students learned to configure multiple modes, including speech, written text, image, gaze, facial expressions, body movement, posture, gesture, and sound, to communicate attitude in their films. The findings provide an exemplar for the teaching and analysis of students' filmmaking that applies systematic, multimodal grammars for communicating attitude. The findings are significant because interpersonal language is a major semiotic system of English, and visual texts now feature prominently in digital communication environments.