Designing learning with tools for monitoring metasemiotic awareness

This chapter deals with designing learning with digital technologies using tools to support, assess, and monitor multisemiotic awareness. The tools are (1) a digital questionnaire, (2) analysis methods of the data from the questionnaire, and (3) semi-structured interviews that stimulate communicative production. The aim of this chapter is to describe the tools and their potential for development and application. Multiliteracies need to be taught in order to meet the requirements of the changing semiotic landscape (Jewitt, 2005; Kress, 2003; Sindoni et al., 2019; Van Leeuwen, 2005). To achieve this, there is a need to better understand metasemiotic awareness in students in relation to a variety of existing and emerging genres. The aim is to foster critical multiliteracies through designing learning for a specific group of students, at a specific age in relation to specific text types. Understanding a student’s or a group of students’ metasemiotic awareness in relation to critical multimodal literacy is a key step in designing learning to aid the eventual mastery of these new emerging genres (Boistrup & Selander, 2022, p. 8). The methods described here support the identification of specific remedial strategies “to meet the challenges and a!ordances o!ered by technology in a digital age … in which language combined with images and sound resources in complex ways” (O’Halloran & Tan, 2015, p. 1). Literacy, in this current chapter, is referred to as the abilities required to access, analyse, and evaluate images, sounds, and messages in contemporary culture; to competently interact using the available media; to impact individual and group decision-making processes; and to critically analyse and solve problems creatively (adapted from Pérez Tornero, 2004).