Animated English

This project began as a piece of exploratory research. By nature it was pedagogically neutral (that is it adhered to no strict definition of literacy or literacy attainment) and unsystematic (that is, it sought to identify relations between moving image and print rather than working along predetermined lines).

In the previous studies this approach brought some tentative conclusions: that moving image work might itself enhance the descriptive language of students; that it might in itself become part of a newly defined set of literacy practices; and that narrative might be an effective bridge between the two media - enhancing understanding of narrative features through complement and contrast.

The project involved two Year 7 classes. They began by reading a novel in the 'conventional' classroom manner (with work on language and theme) and were then asked to produce poems based upon elements of the story. Then they produced more structured poems, based upon the narrative structure of the novel. These poems were used as the basis for storyboards, which were created after a conceptual and practical introduction. The information in the storyboards was then translated into paper backgrounds, characters and props. The stories were then filmed and edited with the help and guidance of the bfi's animation officer using iMacs and the available features of iMovie. During and after the moving image work, which involved ten sessions with the animation officer and extra editing session with class teachers, various pieces of writing were undertaken by students as part of their ordinary English lessons. These provided data for any significant changes in the students' writing during the moving image work.

There was a sense in which the animation work became a technologically mediated task, rather than a linguistic or narrative one. It was adapted to the individual pedagogies of two teachers involved but because they were not working to pre-defined literacy definitions, the students guided learning was divided between the mechanics of film and addressing issues of narrative in a conventional classroom manner, somewhat disassociated from the moving image element. More teacher INSET may be a way of addressing this in future.

The key finding from this research thus far has been that the students' compositional skills with regard to structuring a narrative in film were far ahead of their written compositional skills. Those elements that have been identified as key areas of narrative development in children - orientation and coherence - were, through the explicit demands of focalisation and sequencing in film-making, significantly improved. If we add 'content' to these two categories, as a narrative feature that is made explicit through moving-image, then we have there terms that correlate to Halliday's metafunctions of language: the ideational (content), the interpersonal (orientation) and the textual (coherence).

These three metafunctions form the basis of Halliday's functional grammar. And systemic functional grammar has become one of the leading elements of new research in literacy and schooling. The idea, substantiated in many studies, is that providing students with knowledge about language, based upon systemic functional divisions - such as register and genre, metafunction, grammatical metaphor - gives them the tools with which to analyse the meaning-making properties of language to enhance the critical approach of their reading and writing. Finding a metalanguage for language is crucial if language itself is to be used knowingly rather than absorbed as a set of rigidly defined rules. One of the most useful ways to convey this grammatical understanding is by making the elements of literacy explicit.

This is where the moving image findings from this project are of interest. Within the narrative genre, it made the metafunctions of language explicit, in terms of content, orientation and coherence. That these were not pursued as part of the classroom teaching is because they have arisen in the light of the research itself. If, at a systemtic grammatical level, moving image media can be used to make structures of language in all its registers and genres explicit, the benefits to literacy could be immense.

The explicitness of moving image might be identified as first among its affordances. In a multimodal English classroom, moving image media could be used as a tool to help students acquire a more critical literacy, one that puts language use into perspective as well as clarifying its functions. The contrasts between the two modes at the three metafunctional levels would also benefit from further research. The project has strengthened our understanding of the structural basis for relations between moving image and print literacy. The insights this affords can be used as a foundation for systematic, pedagogically informed research in thee future.

The final report will appear on this site soon.

For more details about this project contact:

Head of bfi Education

BFI

21 Stephen Street

London W1T 1LN

Tel: 020 7957 8973

Contact form