Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication

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Routledge, 2010 - Business & Economics - 212 pages

The 21st century is awash with ever more mixed and remixed images, writing, layout, sound, gesture, speech, and 3D objects. Multimodality looks beyond language and examines these multiple modes of communication and meaning making.

Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication represents a long-awaited and much anticipated addition to the study of multimodality from the scholar who pioneered and continues to play a decisive role in shaping the field. Written in an accessible manner and illustrated with a wealth of photos and illustrations to clearly demonstrate the points made, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication deliberately sets out to locate communication in the everyday, covering topics and issues not usually discussed in books of this kind, from traffic signs to mobile phones.

In this book, Gunther Kress presents a contemporary, distinctive and widely applicable approach to communication. He provides the framework necessary for understanding the attempt to bring all modes of meaning-making together under one unified theoretical roof.

This exploration of an increasingly vital area of language and communication studies will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in the fields of English language and applied linguistics, media and communication studies and education.

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About the author (2010)

Gunther Kress is Professor of Education and English at the Institute of Education, University of London. He has an interest in the interrelations in contemporary texts of different modes of communication and their effects on forms of learning and knowing. His recent publications include Reading Images(1996) with T. van Leeuwen; Before Writing: Rethinking the Paths to Literacy (1997); Multimodal Discourse(2001) with T. van Leewuen; and Literacy in the New Media Age (2002).

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