Foreword [Teaching literature and language through multimodal texts]

Abstract

In many ways, texts are an integral part of teaching and learning. For those of us who are language teachers, texts are not only what we use when teaching but they also contribute to our professional development, at times indirectly. The texts we use in the classroom end up becoming highly familiar to us through the act of teaching. In fact, the writer and educator Joyce Carol Oates (in an interview with Phillips, 2003) maintains that “Anyone who teaches knows that you don’t really experience a text until you’ve taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class” (p. 32). Texts are fundamental to the experience of engaging with language and literature in the classroom, an experience whose value is intensified by multimodality. The word text derives from the Latin textus, referring to the style or texture of a work but originally meaning something woven. In fact, in Institutio Oratoria, the Roman rhetorician Quintilian advises orators that after having chosen their words, these must be woven together into a fine and delicate fabric. The weaving metaphor seems highly appropriate when one considers that a text is constructed out of signs that are carefully arranged together to convey meaning while being open to interpretation. Traditionally understood as anything written, text has gradually expanded its meaning to incorporate any kind of object that can be read, the latter being an activity that is as much applicable to language as it is to other semiotic products.