Research in the Teaching of English Feb 2025

Differentiating Appreciation of Characterization in Print, Graphic Novel, and Movie Versions of Children’s Literature: Multimodal Analyses to Develop Students’ Interpretive Stance

Thu Ngo UNSW Sydney ; Len Unsworth Australian Catholic University

Abstract

Language arts and literacy curricula around the world have been advocating for the teaching and learning of literature in multiple forms. However, apparently in much of classroom practice, little attention has been given to distinguishing the literary distinctiveness of multiple forms of ostensibly the same story. Developing an appreciation of the distinctive interpretive possibilities of multi-version literary narratives may be facilitated by semiotic analyses that indicate how the deployment of image, paralanguage, and language resources have been designed to orient the audience to particular interpretive options. Understanding how to analyze texts to determine such orientations is a crucial aspect of critical literacy. In this paper, we draw on systemic functional linguistics and its extension to the description of the meaning-making resources of image and paralanguage to focus on how differences in characterization are achieved in three versions of the story of Coraline.

Journal
Research in the Teaching of English
Published
2025-02-01
DOI
10.58680/rte2025593285
CompPile
Open Access
Closed
Topics
discourse analysis teacher development multimodality literacy studies
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