This means that we need to extend the range of literacy pedagogy so that it does not unduly privilege alphabetical representations, but brings into the classroom multimodal representations, and particularly those typical of the new, digital media. This makes literacy pedagogy all the more engaging for its manifest connections with today’s communications milieu. It also provides a powerful foundation for a pedagogy of synaesthesia, or mode switching.

these new literacies are embodied in new social practices—ways of working in new or transformed forms of employment, new ways of participating as a citizen in public spaces, and even perhaps, new forms of identity and personality.

As a consequence, the traditional emphasis on alphabetical literacy (letter sounds in words in sentences in texts in literatures) would need to be supplemented in a pedagogy of Multiliteracies by learning how to read and write multimodal texts which integrated the other modes with language.

literacy curriculum taught to a singular standard (grammar, the literary canon, standard national forms of the language), the everyday experience of meaning making was increasingly one of negotiating discourse differences.

The world was changing, the communications environment was changing, and it seemed to us to follow that literacy teaching and learning would to have to change, as well.

The definition of literacy has evolved in the 21st century. The basic definition of literacy means to be able to read and write. To be successful in today’s digital world, literacy goes far beyond being able to read and write. What it means to be digitally literate has reflected the change in how information is processed, delivered, and received in today’s highly connected world.