Reflection on "Rereading the signs"

Siegel (2006)’s article points out the important role technology plays in combining threads of literacy practices and development. New context and purpose have been created through the use of technology, and in turn, new notion of authorship and publishing are blooming. Multimodal transformations of literacy has made linear representation of texts become more interactive and reader-friendly. An emergent path of literacy value the symbol systems, emphasizing the importance of sign-making and sign-reading in a variety of modes. This reminds me of my writing class in elementary school. Each student got a writing notebook with a blank column on the top of the page and lines at the bottom of the pages. The teacher always encouraged us to draw something first on the blank part of the notebook, and based on the drawings, we could tell our own stories in written language. The drawing images, compared to texts, are more concrete, which enable little kids to develop their ideas with little constraints of their literacy proficiency. In middle schools and high schools, the multimodal literate behaviors were no longer valued by school teachers. Most of the time, students were asked to write on a topic given by teacher without any visual or audio support. First of all, it may be difficult for students to interpret the topic itself. In the same vein, students were only allowed to express themselves through conventional text system and be evaluated in the same mode, which privileges written language above all other symbol systems and indirectly limit students’ development to only adult-defined literacy.