The Story Was Still There

The Story Was Still There

Aaron loved stories. He imagined daring adventures, mysterious creatures, and characters who made him laugh. Whenever he had a new idea, he reached for a pencil and began writing. In Aaron’s imagination, there was always another story waiting to be told.

At school, Aaron wanted his classmates to enjoy his stories. But Aaron had dyslexia. His ideas came quickly, while spelling, handwriting, and organizing those ideas on paper took much longer. When other people read his work, they sometimes noticed the confusing words before they noticed the story.

Slowly, Aaron began writing less and drawing more. In his pictures, readers could see the characters, setting, action, and emotions that were difficult for him to explain in writing. The drawings were part of how Aaron created and communicated meaning. Visual and linguistic modes provide different resources for constructing meaning (Walsh, 2006).

Aaron loved reading stories, too. However, many of the books that interested him were still too difficult for him to decode independently. Then Aaron discovered audiobooks. Now he could enter the stories he wanted to experience. Readers construct meaning differently as they move among written, visual, and auditory forms of text (Walsh, 2006).

One day, Aaron’s teacher told the class, “Today, you may use words, pictures, sound, or another mode to help your audience understand your writing.” For the first time in a long time, Aaron was excited to share a story at school. Moving ideas from one representational mode to another can deepen interpretation and literacy learning (Oldakowski, 2014).

Aaron began drawing the most important scenes. Next, he orally rehearsed, adding short captions and dialogue. Then he recorded himself narrating the story. Afterward, he returned to his writing and revised the unclear sections. Transmediation allows learners to revisit and reshape meaning by representing an idea through different modes (Oldakowski, 2014).

Aaron presented his finished story. This time, his classmates could follow the action through his narration, pictures, and written captions. They saw the storyteller he had always been. Multimodal composing can increase audience engagement and awareness (Kim & Belcher, 2020).

Aaron still needed explicit instruction in reading, spelling, and writing. Multimodality did not remove the need for instruction. It gave Aaron a meaningful way to communicate his ideas. Multimodal composing may increase interest and engagement, but it does not automatically improve every aspect of conventional writing (Kim & Belcher, 2020).

Aaron’s stories had lived in his imagination, in his pictures, in his spoken words, and in the writing he was still learning to create. Looking beyond one form of literacy, Aaron discovered something. The story was still there. Meaning emerges through the purposeful interaction of linguistic, visual, auditory, spatial, and other modes (Walsh, 2006).

Reference Kim, Y. J., & Belcher, D. (2020). Multimodal composing and traditional essays: Linguistic performance and learner perceptions. RELC Journal, 51(1), 86–100. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033688220906943

Reference Oldakowski, T. (2014). A multimodal assignment that enriches literacy learning. InSight: A Journal of Scholarly Teaching, 9, 70–77.

Reference Walsh, M. (2006). The “textual shift”: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 29(1), 24–37.