English language teaching of attitude and emotion in digital multimodal composition

This paper shows how a linguistic framework describing resources for expressing attitudinal meanings, and its extrapolation to images, informed a multimodal authoring pedagogy designed to extend year five students’ repertoires for evaluative expression. The teachers’ linguistic and visual semiotic knowledge of attitudinal expression and their knowledge and confident use of digital multimodal authoring software were developed through professional learning and collaborative lesson planning with the research team and through modelling of the pedagogy by a professional media artist in the classrooms with the teachers. The emphases were on student enjoyment, building competence and confidence with the authoring tools, extending their repertoires for multimodal expression of attitude, and concomitantly establishing their knowledge of a metalanguage describing types of attitudinal meaning. Students’ digitally created comics dealing with ethical dilemmas demonstrate their use of sophisticated evaluative language and of visual techniques such facial expression, gesture and focalization. The students’ declarative knowledge of resources for expressing attitude was demonstrated in interviews through their prompt exemplifying responses and their use of metalanguage describing different categories of attitude. Pre- and post-test results also showed their expanded knowledge of nuanced expressions of attitude and their ability to identify different types of attitude in text examples.