A productive design framework of social semiotic resources to support student multimodal authoring

The new Australian Curriculum: English requires students to be creators as well as readers of multimodal texts. Creating such a text, an animation for example, is a complex production process requiring a strategic combination of the available affordances such as image, movement, sound, spatial design, gesture, and language to represent and communicate meaning. The challenge is to determine how we can apprentice young learners into making informed multimodal design decisions to help them compose stories that will resonate with their audience. Drawing on social semiotic theory, this paper describes the development of a productive support framework for multimodal authoring based on the 'interpersonal metafunction' which serves to establish social relationships between the viewer and what is viewed; focusing in particular on how students can use moving image social semiotic resources more purposefully to construct viewer stance or focalisation in their multimodal narratives. The framework is a productive (and analytical) system, mapping the focalisation choices and moving image social semiotic resources available with the construction of 3-D animation narratives. The presentation will define focalisation in the context of a research project undertaken with middle years students authoring 3-D animation narratives; and explain the design framework using examples of student work to enrich the description. (This is work is part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded Linkage Project 'Teaching effective 3D authoring in the middle years: multimedia grammatical design and multimedia authoring pedagogy', a collaboration between the University of New England, the University of Tasmania and the Australian Children's Television Foundation.)