Glossary

These are just some common terms that I have come across while learning about literacy and are useful to understand.

Agency: an aspect important to meaning making as it allows individuals to be active designers/creators of meaning with awareness of differences, problem solving, change and innovation

Design: a pattern of meaning and a process of making meaning; noun – the form and structure that something has, including components of the meaning and how they are connected; verb – a sequence of actions including representations, communication and interpretation

Externalised Narrative: communication; thought processes used to make sense of things and actions

Internalised Narrative: representation; expression of meaning made to others

Interpretation: how we make sense of others messages and the meanings expressed through communication and our own representations

Knowledge society: a society valuing dispositions and capacities relating to the

Meaning making: the process of representation and communication that people engage in, made possible by understanding literacy

Modes of Meaning: five broad semiotic or meaning making systems to talk about how we create meaning, including gestural, audio, oral, written-linguistic, visual, spatial and tactile

Multi-literacies: highlights two key aspects of literacy: the linguistic and social diversity in ways meaning is made, and the multi-modal and varied ways through which meaning is expressed and represented

Multi-lingualism: the use of two or more languages, by either an individual or a community

Multimodal literacy: understanding the different ways of knowledge representations and meaning making

Pedagogy: the method and practice behind teaching; in literacy, it is the development of skills and strategies for reading and writing, and in experiencing, conceptualising, analysing and applying texts

Produser: someone who is active in the production/creation of literacy rather than just a passive consumer of it

Semiotics: the study of sign systems; the process of meaning making through these sets of sings and symbols

Synaesthesia: the switching of modes in order to express meaning