Aesthetic Engagement with Mouse Bird Snake Wolf – Literary Multimodal Literacy in English Language Education

Abstract

Multimodal literature plays an increasingly large role in literature and language education, including in English language teaching (ELT) in many contexts. In order to engage with all aspects of multimodal literature, it is necessary to consider both the multimodal and aesthetic nature of literary texts and what type of literacy is required to engage with these texts. In this article I will refer to this as ‘literary multimodal literacy’. I explore how literary multimodal literacy can be understood and how a group of lower secondary school learners in Norway demonstrated some of these competences in a classroom literacy event concerning the multimodal novel Mouse Bird Snake Wolf by David Almond and Dave McKean (2013). Based on this investigation, I will point to possible implications for teaching and acquiring literary multimodal literacy in the English classroom. Keywords: multimodal literature, multimodal novel, ELT, literary multimodal literacy, aesthetic engagement