<p>Video making and sharing have the potential to represent attitude in powerful ways and have become everyday literacy practices for many children. Research has only recently attended to the multimodal grammars of attitudinal meaning that characterize filmic media, while providing few examples of the successful teaching of these semiotic principles to elementary students. This article reports original research conducted in two schools over two years with elementary students (ages 9 to 11 years). It examines students' application of semiotic knowledge of the appraisal framework to communicate attitudinal meanings multimodally through film. Attitudinal meanings in the appraisal framework are categorized as affect, judgment, or appreciation, and can be communicated through discourse and multimodal texts. The students learned to configure multiple modes, including speech, written text, image, gaze, facial expressions, body movement, posture, gesture, and sound, to communicate attitude in their films. The findings provide an exemplar for the teaching and analysis of students' filmmaking that applies systematic, multimodal grammars for communicating attitude. The findings are significant because interpersonal language is a major semiotic system of English, and visual texts now feature prominently in digital communication environments. </p>

Communication using popular digital media involves understanding multimodal systems of appraisal for expressing attitude, which traditionally deals with emotions, ethics, and aesthetics in language. The formulation and teaching of multimodal grammars for attitudinal meanings in popular texts and culture is currently underresearched. This article reports findings from multisite qualitative research that developed students’ ability to use semiotic resources for communicating attitude multimodally. The research participants were 68 students (ages 9–11 years) from two elementary schools. Students learned how to use attitudinal language—affect, judgment, and appreciation—and applied this knowledge to multimodal design. The findings advance a leading system of appraisal for discourse by adapting the system to the multimodal communication of attitude in digital comic making in schooling. The research is significant because it demonstrates the potentials for augmenting students’ linguistic and visual semiotic resources to convey multimodal attitudinal meanings in contemporary communication.