Ikke skrivekyndig?

Abstract

Global expansion of smartphone use has made the production of visual texts easy and accessible. This article explores six adult immigrant students’ multimodal text production in everyday and learning situations. The students are between 25 and 55 years and attend adult education in Norway, they have little or no previous schooling and little experience with alphabetic texts. Yet they produce multimodal texts daily when communicating on their smartphone devices. To study the students multimodal text production the following two questions were asked: 1. what do the texts consist of? 2. What are the purposes of the texts? And in continuation discuss: Could this multimodal text production serve as a resource in learning and communication in and outside the classroom? This study shows that their multimodal texts produced on smartphone applications such as Messenger and WhatsApp, serve different purposes. In everyday communication, multimodal texts are used to maintain transnational contact with family and to solve practical situations with texts based on iconic pictures. In learning situations, the smartphone applications that initially are designed for communication between users, are rather used to produce notes to self, to practice language in- and outside of school as a form of multimodal translanguaging. The article further discusses how maintaining a less logocentric view of text production, including iconic pictures and other multimodal signs, and the possibility of using familiar digital tools, could be a resource in adult immigrants learning and participation. The article concludes that multimodal communication via smartphone is important as a text practice, and it functions to solve specific tasks both in everyday life and in formal learning situations. The use of the student’s experiences with iconic pictures and other multimodal texts, can thus be a resource for participation and learning in- and outside the classroom.