Decoding Multimodal Text by Untrained Readers: a Message for Mother Tongue Pedagogy

Abstract

Within daily communication in our cultural environment, we subconsciously acquire language and other semiotic systems through different genres and use them effortlessly. Concerning texts in general, major importance to the cultural environment in construing their meaning and understanding them has been paid by different scholars. They comprehend text as ‘the product of its environment’ which ‘functions in that environment’ (Halliday [1977] 2002: 47–8), or ‘as a site of interaction’ (Hoey 2001: 11–51), whose meaning is determined ‘within the functional model of language and social Context in which it evolved’ (Martin and Rose 2008: 16–20, 231), or, according to van Dijk, in connection with ‘contextual structures, as knowledge and beliefs, and so on’ ([1977] 1992: 228). They all claim the influence of the cultural environment as an inherent aspect of text structure. Hoey (2001: 119–69) demonstrates that many types of text are organized as culturally popular patterns. Meaning in text is not necessarily construed only from a verbal semiotic code but also multimodally. In recent decades there has been a dramatic increase in the production of the so-called ‘multisemiotic’ text (Ventola 1987) or ‘multimodal text’ (Kress and van Leeuwen [1996] 2005), that means ‘any text whose meanings are realised through more than one semiotic code’.