Len UNSWORTH
(University of New England, Armidale, Australia)

ABSTRACT: The literacies needed in this multimedia information age must embrace both images and the printed word in electronic and traditional media. Today both language and images are integral to the texts we use. As well as making meanings separately, language and images combine to make meanings in new ways in contemporary texts. A functional semiotic theory of the ways images and language interact to make meanings can provide a metalanguage for literacy education that takes into account the multimodal forms of contemporary texts. This presentation draws on two large on-going Australian Government funded research projects in which the author is a chief investigator, to describe emerging functional semiotic accounts of image/text relations and their implications for approaches to multimodal literacy education.