Music in The Lost Thing animated movie

My colleague Georgina Barton and I have just published a paper on the role of music in the construction of meaning in the animated move version of the picture book,  The Lost Thing, by Shaun Tan.  Music seems to be ignored by researchers interested in the multimodal construction of meaning and is also ignored in most of the teaching about multimodal texts in schools.  Georgina has provided the documentation about how the music contributes to the construction of key meanings in this movie.  Check out our work in the Australian Journal of Language and Literacy:

Barton, G., & Unsworth, L. (2014). Music, multiliteracies and multimodality: Exploring the book and movie versions of Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 37(1), 3-20.

National Literacy Testing and Multimodal Reading Comprehension

Here is the link to my most recent journal publication http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/fpSqvxwAqASEgZYrz6Za/full 

Unsworth, L. 2014. Multimodal Reading Comprehension: Curriculum Expectations and Large-scale Literacy Testing Practices.Pedagogies: An International Journal, 9, 26-44.

The article draws attention to the mismatch between the new Australian National Curriculum:English, which emphasizes the importance of multimodal literacy and the lack of realistic attention to multimodal reading comprehension in the national literacy testing program – National Assessment Program in Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN).