Section 3 - Media Literacy In The UK
Specific Literacies
A further, more detailed question about media literacies and how they might relate to the print literacy which is central to the English curriculum is to ask about specific media. If media literacy is partly about a conceptual grasp of the big ideas contained in the framework proposed in Section 1, it is also about the micro-level of literacy - how meaning is made at the level of the word/sentence, the frame/shot, and so on. Students might like to take examples of different media (eg a still or shot from a film, a page from a cartoon strip, a front page of a newspaper, a screengrab from a computer game, the home-page of a website, a brief extract from a radio programme, a brief sequence from a music video) and ask the following questions, which are not systematic or exhaustive, but do raise some central functions of language which have their counterparts in other media:
- point of view? - how is this constructed through the system of person in language; and through 'focalisation'?
- temporality? - how is this dealt with in language, through tense, ellipsis, analepsis, and so on? how do these work in other media?
- action? - How are events and actions, the basis of narrative, and the business of verbs in language, represented in other media? How is an action differently represented by a verb in language, a movement on film, a press of a playstation button in a game, or a trio of speed-lines and a dustcloud in a comicstrip?
- argument - how is an argument made in different media? what resources are available for this?
- description? - How do these different media represent different sensory experiences?
- dialogue? - How is human speech differently represented in books, films, games, comicstrips?
- thought? - What are the different opportunities and constraints in the different media for representing thought processes?
They might also read further. The British Film Institute has campaigned for the specific idea of a literacy related to the moving image, which it has termed cine-literacy. This is elaborated in the report Making Movies Matter.
I have also written a brief article about the moving image, proposing ways in which it has a grammar which can be compared to the grammar of language, and basing the argument on a chocolate advert made by my own GCSE Media Studies group in 2001. The full article is in The English and Media Magazine (Burn, A & Parker (2001) ‘Reading Films, Selling Chocolate: some proposals for a grammar of the moving image’, English and Media Magazine, Autumn 2001 ).
A further piece of reading, again an article of mine, is one which explores the idea of a grammar of computer games, again in the context of English and literacy (Burn, A (2004) ‘From The Tempest To Tomb-Raider: Computer Games In English, Media And Drama’, English, Drama, Media, Sheffield: NATE, Vol. 1, Issue 2).
 
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