Who Cares About Children’s Rights? Critical Multimodal Awareness and its Implications for the Design, Analysis and Use of Children’s Online Educational Materials
The present paper focuses on strategies for making sense of image/text relations
in a sub-corpus of institutional websites specifically designed by adults
to sensitize primary and early secondary school children to the issue of human
(viz. children’s) rights. The multimodal materials of this specific sub-corpus
were tested, by means of questionnaires and semi-structured interviews,
on 100 children from grade 3 to 8 in a local school where English is used
as the main language of instruction. The research is informed by systemic
functional linguistic theory in its social semiotic applications to other modes
of communication. It draws on the notion of (here, children) empowerment
as a multi-dimensional social process, investigated through the analysis of
checklists focusing on the main verbal and nonverbal strategies children enact
to make sense of the multimodal texts and on some basic problematic areasin adult-generated materials creating barriers to informing and eliciting the
participation of young learners. More specifically, this paper discusses the
main findings of children questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with
particular reference to issues of usability, accessibility, critical awareness, and
impact of message. The main focus is on the interface between children’s (often
inadequate) website exploration strategies and adults’ (often defective)
strategies of materials design. The two-fold implication of the research is: on
the one hand, to provide young learners with remedial strategies for making
sense of such materials while developing greater autonomy and critical
multimodal awareness; and, on the other, to fine-tune checklists for analysis
and offer guidelines and best practices for the multimodal construction
of adult-generated materials, thus potentially configuring a critical linguistic
pedagogy centrally concerned with the role of discourse in social practice.
