Multiliteracies: A Literature Review

This chapter examines the conceptualization of “multiliteracies,” both in the work of the New London Group (1996) and the wider literature that reports on the ways in which the idea has been applied and researched. Our review ranges across the three main questions asked of literacy in the original article: Why, what, and how. In response to why, we investigate the ways in which the literature on multiliteracies has addressed the question of changing social conditions, with an emphasis on diversity and digitally mediated technologies of representation and communication. Addressing the question of what, we focus on the movement between modes or forms of meaning, variously named synesthesia, transduction, transmediation, intersemiosis and, most recently, transposition. Finally, on the question of how, we return to the pedagogy of multiliteracies with a discussion of its significance as an attempt to rebalance the cognitive emphases of literacy with socio-emotional and embodied perspectives.