As a scholarly approach, multiliteracy focuses on the new "literacy" that is developing in response to the changes in the way people communicate globally due to technological shifts and the interplay between different cultures and languages.
Transformed practice uses the previous three aspects to encourage reflection and apply these teachings in a new context, achieving a personal goal.
The definition of media is being extended to include text combined with sounds, and images which are being incorporated into movies, billboards, almost any site on the internet, and television.
The formulation of "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies" by the New London Group expanded the focus of literacy from reading and writing to an understanding of multiple discourses and forms of representation in public and professional domains.
The new literacy pedagogy was developed to meet the learning needs of students to allow them to navigate within these altered technological, cultural, and linguistically diverse communities.
[3] Due to changes in the world, especially globalization and an increase in immigration, a debate has arisen about the way students are instructed and learning in school.
The New London Group (1996) proposes the teaching of all representations of meaning including, linguistic, visual, audio, spatial, and gestural, which are subsumed under the category of multimodal.
Courtney Cazden from the United States has worked in the areas of classroom discourse and multilingual teaching and learning; Bill Cope from Australia, on literacy pedagogy and linguistic diversity, and new technologies of representation and communication; Mary Kalantzis from Australia, on experimental social education and citizenship education; Norman Fairclough from the United Kingdom, on critical discourse analysis, social practices and discourse, and the relationship between discursive change and social and cultural change; Gunther Kress from the United Kingdom, on social semiotics, visual literacy, discourse analysis, and multimodal literacy; James Gee from the United States, on psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and language and literacy; Allan Luke from Australia on critical literacy and applied linguistics; Carmen Luke from Australia, on feminism and critical pedagogy; Sarah Michaels from the United States, on classroom discourse; and Martin Nataka on indigenous education and higher education curriculum.
Overt instruction is the direct teaching of "metalanguages" in order to help learners understand the components of expressive forms or grammars.
They believe human cognition is situated and contextual, and meanings are grounded in the real world of patterns of experience, action and subjective interest.
When it comes to reading and writing, authentic literacy pedagogy promotes a process of natural language growth that begins when a child learns to speak, with a focus on internalized understanding rather than the formalities of rules.
Second, situated practice does not necessarily create learners who can critique what they are learning in terms of historical, cultural, political, ideological, or value-centered relations.
The traditional curricula operates on various rules of inclusion and exclusion in the hierarchical ordering of textual practices, often dismissing text types such as picture books or popular fiction.
In addition to acknowledging increased socio-cultural contextualization and diversification of text-types, multiliteracies pedagogies also enable us to critically frame and reconceptualize traditional notions of writing, calling into question issues of authority, authorship, power, and knowledge.
Multiliteracies transcend conventional print literacies and the centrality of cultures that have historically extolled it, offering much scope for arts-based approaches in decolonizing initiatives (Flicker et al., 2014)[12] or reflexive visual methodologies in situated contexts (Mitchell, DeLange, Moletsane, Stuart, & Buthelezi, 2005).
According to Cope and Kalantzis, "Overt Instruction introduces an often overlooked element-the connection of the element of the importance of contextualization of learning experiences to conscious understanding of elements of language meaning and design" (p. 116) Use of metalanguages, Cope and Kalantzis argue, is one of the key features of Overt Instruction.
After applying overt instruction orientation to curriculum practices for around a decade, this dimension of literacy pedagogy was reframed and translated in the Learning by Design project into the 'knowledge process' of conceptualizing (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009, 2015).
Conceptualizing, according to Cope and Kalantzis (p. 19) occurs in two ways: Transformed practice, originally framed by the New London Group (1996)[5] as part of the four components of multiliteracies pedagogy, is embedded in authentic learning, where activities are re-created according to the lifeworld of learners.
Transformed practice subsequently underwent reformation and was renamed "applying" as part of "knowledge processes" (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009, p. 184),[6] formerly known as multiliteracy pedagogy.