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While it is important for students to engage in situated practice, they still need explicit instruction, especially when learning, understanding and creating meaning using a variety of modes. “Overt instruction helps learners focus on important features and gain experiences that allow them to understand systematic, analytic, and cognizant explanations of different modes of meaning” (Biswas, 2014). 21st century literacy, and beyond, requires that students design and create texts in a multitude of modes. It is important that educators use overt instruction to explain how to use these modes effectively.
That is not to say that overt instruction in a multiliteracies environment requires students to rote learn skills through repetition and memorization, but rather that teachers need to introduce skills that build on students understanding, and situated practice, so that they are better able to produce multimodal texts (Angay-Crowder, Choi, & Yi, 2013). Again, it is important to weave all of the four components of multiliteracies pedagogy together to effectively educate students. Through overt instruction, teachers can introduce a skill or topic, develop the metalanguage, and then simply lead and monitor student progress through the critical framing, transforming, and situated practice stages of learning. It also helps develop an awareness of what, how, and why they are learning about a specific skill, before applying it in other learning stages. |