Abstract

The digital era requires new approaches to the development of literacy through multimodal media of communication. It also requires a rethinking of the ways that research data can be used in the teaching practice, so as to support the students’ efforts to enhance multimodal communication skills. From very early on, children develop a variety of cultural experiences, by dealing with texts combining words, symbols, images, movement, graphs and sound, as well as with new types of printing and digital technology (e.g. newspapers, advertisements, magazines, movies, television and radio shows, the web, etc.). The school subject of Language Arts cannot ignore these developments, if it is to meet the actual communication needs of contemporary people. In order to meet these needs, schools should implement systematically designed practices, featuring a variety of modes and media of communication for the elaboration of multimodal texts. The present aims to investigate the degree to which Greek Language Arts textbooks attempt to develop the students’ multimodal communication skills through the elaboration of multimodal texts. More specifically, this research attempts to investigate whether the choice of texts and the activities of text comprehension-analysis and written discourse production fall under the concept of multimodality in multiliteracies. The findings indicate a great effort towards in-class elaboration of multimodal texts, in terms of both rates and different types of multimodal discourse, through varied medium site of display. However, this bears no homology with the study and use of varied modes and media, so as to provide students with sufficient means to develop multimodal experiences in Language Arts .