Go Fly a Kite! or Multimodality: The 5th Hybrid Skill

A little background: We are reading about writing and how wordprocessing facilitates the writing process in a language learning classroom (Jarvis, 1997). OK.... sounds obvious.

Then I found an article which says that MS Word is dead! Obsolete! It no longer meets the needs of online writers! You can read it here: http://slate.me/IrzVT6

I posted about this seeming 'clash' of ideas in my class forum, and my instructor's response got me thinking about a possible 5th hybrid communication skill (Slaouti, 2012). 

I am fascinated by this idea, as I think it gets at something I noticed a year ago, but didn't know what to call it....now I do. I think there IS a 5th communication skill, and I will call it "multimodal" skills, as opposed to our traditional reading, writing, listening and speaking skills. 

I have a nephew who one year ago was 8 years old. His class was doing a project where the teacher showed the kids how to make kites, which they did in class, and then they took the kites out into the schoolyard to fly them. My mother who is a volunteer at the school was there to help, and she filmed short video clips of the whole activity on her digital camera (not a video cam...just a point and shoot still cam with video capability...hence the short clips). There were little scenes of the kids gluing frames, cutting paper, tying string, painting the paper, running outside, trying to fly the kites. It certainly had no structure other than a sequence in time.

Later, on the weekend, my nephew was busily working on the computer, and I was amazed to see that he had taken those short video clips and was editing them together to make a movie that he wanted to show his class! I don't even know what program he was using, but it had to have been simple enough for an eight -year-old to figure out for himself. He certainly was not receiving any prompting or guidance from the 3 amazed and clueless adults in the house! But it gets better... While he was editing the video clips together, he was also typing and adding subtitles, explaining what happened, and adjusting fonts and colours. He asked us for several spellings when he wasn't sure. He also searched, found, and downloaded a piece of music to run in the background, and was able to control the volume, and sync it to the video.  He was really excited that he would have something that "he made himself" to put on the SmartBoard for the class to see! What was amazing to me was that this was all happening simultaneously. It wasn't as though he first made the video, and then "added things onto it". There was no pre-planning, editing, revising....the different parts simply sprang up naturally as he progressed through the process. Video, text, sound, music, speaking, listening, reading, searching: all coming together simultaneously to create one project which he could share. "Multimodality" in action!! At the time, not only was I blown away by the computer skills of this child (Where did he get that from, in this family of Luddites?), but I also felt something happening in my brain regarding education, and the way we think about teaching communication, and teaching children and perhaps language learners in modern schools. 

If we had done such a kite building activity when I was in grade three, I'm pretty sure that the follow up activity would have been to write, or "compose" a narrative of what happened, and perhaps illustrate it with drawings. You would have seen a bulletin board filled with paragraphs on lined paper, with drawings of kids with kites lining the halls! That 'writing composition' would have been the sum total of our 'communication' about the events.

Now, 35 years later, the child has moved so far past the point of 'composing a paragraph on paper', that I started to wonder if teaching writing, phonics, spelling, composition, organization is all passé? In a world where a child can pick up a computer and create a 10 minute video with all of its bells and whistles to communicate his ideas to the masses, what relevance does mere writing have to him? Ten years from now, when he is ready to enter university, will he have any desire, or need to do lengthy writing when he has such multimodal skills at his disposal? I can see why kids are bored with reading and writing in school. It must seem completely archaic to them when they are able to instantaneously find, acquire, and put to immediate use a wide variety of materials encompassing all forms of communication. Writing??? Composing???? Why would anyone want to do that? The world is so much bigger, and faster than that!

I don't work with children, so I may be way off base. I work with adult language learners, in a pre-EAP program, and often wonder about similar issues. Are we truly preparing students with life skills? Our focus in a university setting is heavily and squarely on writing skills. They will need to be able to write in university. Writing is our bottom line. If they can't write, they can't go on. And yet, where are the "multimodal" skills? Presumably, in the real world, the students will need to be able to do so much more than write. And ten years from now, when my nephew hits university, will there be any point in writing at all?  Won't he by then be able to "compose" his assignments, even his thesis in a multimodal format? That's my prediction. 

I think we need an adjustment in our thinking: FAST!! The traditional 4 skills we cling to in language teaching must be shuffled around to make way for a 5th skill: multimodal communication skills. We ignore this at the cost of our students' full communicative abilities and needs, heading into the future.

I haven't done any reading in this area yet, so have nothing to back me up, but I'm just intrigued by the concept. Read anything on this? Comments welcome!

References:


Jarvis, H. 1997. Word-processing and writing skills: practical applications to language teaching text books, British Journal of Educational Technology, 28(3), pp.165-175.

Scocca, T. 2012. Death to Word, Slate Magazine. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/04/microsoft_word_is_cumbersome_inefficient_and_obsolete_it_s_time_for_it_to_die_.html [Accessed April 13, 2012].

Slaouti, D. 2012. Re: MS Word is Obsolete! [forum post]. Message to Rona McIntyre. Sent April 14, 2012, 09:35 BST.