Student composition of digital animated multimodal narratives: the multimodal grammatical knowledge of students and teachers

The world which students inhabit is increasingly digital, multimedia and online. In order to prepare students to be effective authors in this environment, it is important to enquire as to what students and teachers know about how meaning is constructed in multimodal texts. In the context of a project to introduce middle years teacher and their classes to the composition of multimodal texts, this paper concerns questionnaires designed to gather data related to the knowledge of multimodal grammatical ideas such as genre, setting/location, characterisation, affordances of camera work and point-of-view. In the context of the project, these instruments are be used as both pre-test and post-test. This paper will describe the development of the questionnaire, and the results to date (which is the multimodal grammatical knowledge claimed by participants prior to instruction), and the implications for literacy and multimedia education.