Re-thinking Assessment: multimodality, literacy and computer-mediated learning

All teaching and learning in the school classroom involves a range of modes including speech, writing, gesture, gaze, body-posture, movement, and so on—in other words teaching and learning are multimodal. This is as true of school English, where common-sense would have it that teaching and learning are fully realised in language, as it is of school Science where the role of action is firmly established in the curriculum. While all teaching and learning is multimodal, the use of computers in the classroom serves to emphasise the multimodal character of pedagogy. Computer applications introduce new kinds of texts into the classroom and these demand different practices of students. In turn this suggests the need to re-think conceptions of literacy, learning and assessment—to move beyond the narrow definition of literacy apparent in recent government policy to a broader definition that realises the connections between literacy and social practices in a multimodal digital era. The questions raised by the move from a language-based curriculum to a multimodal curriculum are explored in this paper through an illustrative example of computer mediated learning in the school English classroom.