Multiliteracies and Metalanguage: Describing Image/Text Relations as a Resource for Negotiating Multimodal Texts

New Literacies are diverse, dynamic, immediate, interactive, multimodal, rapidly evolving, and requisite for living and learning in the age of information and communication technologies (ICTs). This chapter explores a central principle of new literacies: that they are multiple in nature (New London Group, 2000). It focuses on the nature and role of a metalanguage that encompasses an integrated description of the combined meaning-making resources of language and images in multimodal texts. Image/text relations contribute to new literacies' typical representation of meaning in multiple modalities, which also include music, sound effects, and digital affordances such as windows and hyperlinks. This multimodal communication of meaning is one key dimension of the ongoing reconceptualization of literacy that has led to the construct of multiliteracies (New London Group, 2000; Unsworth, 2001).