Sensitising Students to Multimodality and Genre: A Diamesic and Diachronic Approach

This chapter looks at the methods adopted to sensitise university students to multimodality and genre. Groups of students compiled corpora of the same genre (obituaries) divided diachronically and diamesically. They analysed the texts according to Bhatia’s genre analysis approach focussing on language patterns (using Coh-Metrix), text patterns (using a specifically developed Time-based moves annotation), and multimodality (using transcription techniques). Student development was gauged with a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. This chapter touches on three sets of results emerging from this process: the socio-anthropological aspect of who is newsworthy in a specific socio-cultural context; insight into the genre analysis of obituaries, and tools for gauging student multimodal genre awareness.