MULTILITERACIES IN THE SINGAPORE ENGLISH LANGUAGE CLASSROOM

The purpose of this project is first to understand how multiliteracies, specifically multimodal literacy, are currently taught in the English Language subject classroom in Singapore schools and then to develop an instructional approach to teach multimodal literacy for lower secondary and upper primary students. The work on developing an instructional approach, informed by systemic functional theory, for the teaching of multimodal literacy, is inspired by Michael Halliday's clarion call towards an 'appliable linguistics' (Mahboob & Knight, 2010), where the value of a theory lies in the use that can be made of it. (Halliday, 2006: 192). This project represents an attempt to translate the advances made in the field of multimodality into a theoretically informed and practically grounded instructional approach to teach multimodal literacy in the secondary and primary school context.