Kress,+Introduction

in the Department of Learning, Curriculum & Communication at the [|Institute of Education] of the [|University of London]. ** Works **
 * [[image:http://www.knowledgepresentation.org/BuildingTheFuture/Kress2/Kress_Images/Gunter_Kress.jpg width="324" height="213" align="left"]]Gunther Kress** (b. 26 November 1940) is Professor of Semiotics and Education
 * Kress, Gunther R. (1997). Before Writing: Rethinking the Paths to Literacy . New York: Routledge.
 * Kress, Gunther R. (2003).Literacy in the New Media Age . New York: Routledge.
 * Kress, Gunther R. ; Van Leeuwen, Theo (2006). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. New York: Routledge.



toc See also ** 
 * Visual literacy
 * Gunther Kress page at the Institute of Education
 * Reading Images: Multimodality, Representation and New Media
 * Moving Image Archive
 * VADS - the online source for visual arts
 * Semiotics for Beginners, Daniel Chandler

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About //Reading Images//
At first glance, given its cover and title, you might think that //Reading Image//s is a book about graphic design. What you soon realize, however, is that Kress and Van Leeuwen are developing a very powerful theoretical framework for understanding all forms of visual representation. Kress himself is one of the leading theorists who helped fashion this framework using the work of the Australian linguist Michael Haliday discussed below in the selection from Wikipedia on social semiotics. In //Reading Images//, Kress and Van Leeuwen develop a "grammar" which applies to visual images the five key points Halliday makes about natural language. Don't be fooled by the dry, analytic presentation or scared away by the terminology. This book is revolutionary, both intellectually and politically. It will change how you see.

You can look over the Wikipedia entries below to get a quick sense of the various threads that Kress and Van Leeuwen are weaving together: an account of visual literacy that draws on work not only in social semiotics but also cognitive psychology and sociolinguistics. For a quick introduction to their book, I would recommend starting with the illustrated text on Kress' web site for  Reading Images: Multimodality, Representation and New Media. It, I think, gives a more succinct account of his ideas than the introduction to the text itself. If you are not familiar with some basic principles of semiotics, I would also recommend looking at Daniel Chandler nice online text,  Semiotics for Beginners.

Visual Literacy

 * Visual literacy** is the ability to [|interpret], negotiate, and make meaning from information presented in the form of an [|image]. Visual literacy is based on the idea that [|pictures] can be “read” and that meaning can be communicated through a process of reading.

The term “visual literacy” is credited to John Debes, co-founder of the [|International Visual Literacy Association].[|[1]] In 1969 Debes offered a tentative definition of the concept: “Visual literacy refers to a group of vision-competencies a human being can develop by seeing and at the same time having and integrating other sensory experiences.” However, because multiple disciplines such as [|visual literacy in education], [|art history] and [|criticism], [|rhetoric], [|semiotics], [|philosophy], [|information design], and [|graphic design] make use of the term visual literacy, arriving at a common definition of visual literacy has been contested since its first appearance in professional publications.

Since technological advances continue to develop at an unprecedented rate, educators are increasingly promoting the learning of visual literacies as indispensable to life in the [|information age]. Similar to [|linguistic literacy] (meaning making derived from written or oral human language) commonly taught in schools, most educators would agree that literacy in the 21st Century has a wider scope.[|[3]] Educators are recognizing the importance of helping students develop visual literacies in order to survive and communicate in a highly complex world.

Many [|scholars] from the New London Group[|[4]] such as Courtney Cazden, [|James Gee], [|Gunther Kress], and [|Allan Luke] advocate against the dichotomy of visual literacy versus linguistic literacy. Instead, they stress the necessity of accepting the co-presence[|[5]] of linguistic literacies and visual literacies as interacting and interlacing modalities which complement one another in the meaning making process.

Visual literacy is not limited to modern [|mass media] and new [|technologies]. The graphic novel //[|Understanding Comics]// by [|Scott McCloud] discusses the history of narrative in visual media. Also, animal drawings in ancient caves, such as the one in [|Lascaux], [|France], are early forms of visual literacy. Hence, even though the name visual literacy itself as a label dates to the 1960s, the concept of reading signs and symbols is [|prehistoric]. ** See also **
 * [|Art criticism]
 * [|Art history]
 * [|Chartjunk]
 * [|Comics Studies]
 * [|Educational animation]
 * [|Educational technology]
 * [|Edward Tufte]
 * [|Information design]
 * [|Information graphics]
 * [|Literacy]
 * [|Multiliteracy]
 * [|New Epoch Notation Painting]
 * [|Transliteracy]
 * [|Visual Literacy in Education]
 * [|Visual rhetoric]

**Social semiotics**

 * Social semiotics** is a branch of the field of [|semiotics] which investigates human signifying practices in specific social and cultural circumstances, and which tries to explain meaning-making as a social practice. Semiotics, as originally defined by [|Ferdinand de Saussure], is "the science of the life of signs in society". Social semiotics expands on Saussure's founding insights by exploring the implications of the fact that the "codes" of language and communication are formed by social processes. The crucial implication here is that meanings and semiotic systems are shaped by relations of power, and that as power shifts in society, our languages and other systems of socially accepted meanings can and do change.

Social semiotics is thus the study of the social dimensions of meaning, and of the power of human processes of signification and interpretation (known as semiosis) in shaping individuals and societies. Social semiotics focuses on social meaning-making practices of all types, whether visual, verbal or aural in nature (Thibault, 1991). These different systems for meaning-making, or possible "channels" (e.g. speech, writing, images) are known as semiotic modes. Semiotic modes can include visual, verbal, written, gestural and musical resources for communication. They also include various "multimodal" ensembles of any of these modes (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001).

Social semiotics can include the study of how people design and interpret meanings, the study of texts, and the study of how semiotic systems are shaped by social interests and ideologies, and how they are adapted as society changes (Hodge and Kress, 1988). Structuralist semiotics in the tradition of Ferdinand de Saussure focused primarily on theorising unchanging semiotic systems or structures (termed //[|langue]// by de Saussure). In contrast, social semiotics tries to account for the variability of semiotic practices termed //[|parole]//. This altered focus shows how individual creativity, changing historical circumstances, and new social identities and projects can all change patterns of usage and design (Hodge and Kress, 1988). From a social semiotic perspective, rather than being fixed into unchanging "codes", signs are considered to be resources which people use and adapt (or "design") to make meaning. In these respects, social semiotics was influenced by, and shares many of the preoccupations of [|pragmatics] and [|sociolinguistics] and has much in common with [|cultural studies] and [|critical discourse analysis]. The main task of social semiotics is to develop analytical and theoretical frameworks which can explain meaning-making in a social context (Thibault, 1991).

Linguistic theorist, [|Michael Halliday], introduced the term ‘social semiotics’ into linguistics, when he used the phrase in the title of his book, //Language as Social Semiotic//. This work argues against the traditional separation between language and society, and exemplifies the start of a 'semiotic' approach, which broadens the narrow focus on written language in linguistics (1978). For Halliday, languages evolve as systems of "meaning potential" (Halliday, 1978:39) or as sets of resources which influence what the speaker can do with language, in a particular social context. For example, for Halliday, the grammar of the English language is a system organised for the following three purposes (areas or Any sentence in English is composed like a musical composition, with one strand of its meaning coming from each of the three semiotic areas or metafunctions. [|Robert Hodge], in the [|Semiotics Encyclopedia Online], suggests that the following points sum up the major premises of Halliday’s social semiotics:
 * Facilitating certain kinds of social and interpersonal interactions (interpersonal),
 * Representing ideas about the world (ideational), and
 * Connecting these ideas and interactions into meaningful texts and making them relevant to their context (textual)(1978:112).
 * 1) ‘Language is a social fact’ (1978:1)
 * 2) ‘We shall not come to understand the nature of language if we pursue only the kinds of question about language that are formulated by linguists’ (1978:3)
 * 3) ‘Language is as it is because of the functions it has evolved to serve in people’s lives’ (1978:4).
 * 4) There are three functions, or ‘metafunctions’, of language: ideational (‘about something’), interpersonal (’doing something’) and textual (‘the speaker’s text-forming potential’)(1978:112).
 * 5) Language is constituted as ‘a discrete network of options’ (1978:113)

Cognitive Linguistics
In [|linguistics], **cognitive linguistics** (CL) refers to the branch of linguistics that interprets language in terms of the concepts, sometimes universal, sometimes specific to a particular tongue, which underlie its forms. It is thus closely associated with [|semantics] but is distinct from [|psycholinguistics], which draws upon empirical findings from cognitive psychology in order to explain the mental processes that underlie the acquisition, storage, production and understanding of speech and writing. Cognitive linguistics is characterized by adherence to three central positions. First, it denies that there is an //autonomous linguistic faculty// in the mind; second, it understands grammar in terms of //conceptualization//; and third, it claims that knowledge of language arises out of //language use//.

Cognitive linguists deny that the [|mind] has any module for language-acquisition that is unique and autonomous. This stands in contrast to the stance adopted in the field of [|generative grammar]. Although cognitive linguists do not necessarily deny that part of the human linguistic ability is innate, they deny that it is //separate// from the rest of cognition. They thus reject a body of opinion in cognitive science which suggests that there is evidence for the [|modularity] of language. They argue that knowledge of linguistic phenomena — i.e., phonemes, morphemes, and syntax — is essentially [|conceptual] in nature. However, they assert that the storage and retrieval of linguistic data is not significantly different from the storage and retrieval of other knowledge, and that use of language in understanding employs similar cognitive abilities to those used in other non-linguistic tasks. Departing from the tradition of [|truth-conditional semantics], cognitive linguists view meaning in terms of conceptualization. Instead of viewing meaning in terms of models of the world, they view it in terms of mental spaces.

Finally, cognitive linguistics argues that language is both [|embodied] and [|situated] in a specific [|environment]. This can be considered a moderate offshoot of the [|Sapir-Whorf hypothesis], in that language and cognition mutually influence one another, and are both embedded in the experiences and environments of its users.

Sociolinguistics

 * Sociolinguistics** is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of [|society], including cultural [|norms], expectations, and context, on the way [|language] is used. Sociolinguistics differs from [|sociology of language] in that the focus of sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on the language, while the latter's focus is on the language's effect on the society. Sociolinguistics overlaps to a considerable degree with [|pragmatics].

It also studies how language [|varieties] differ between groups separated by certain [|social] variables, e.g., [|ethnicity], [|religion], [|status], [|gender], level of [|education], [|age], etc., and how creation and adherence to these rules is used to categorize individuals in [|social or socioeconomic classes]. As the usage of a language varies from place to place ([|dialect]), language usage varies among social classes, and it is these //[|sociolects]// that sociolinguistics studies.

The social aspects of language were in the modern sense first studied by Indian and Japanese linguists in the 1930s, and also by Gauchat in Switzerland in the early 1900s, but none received much attention in the West until much later. The study of the social motivation of [|language change], on the other hand, has its foundation in the [|wave model] of the late 19th century. The first attested use of the term //sociolinguistics// was by [|Thomas Callan Hodson] in the title of a 1939 paper.[|[1]] Sociolinguistics in the West first appeared in the 1960s and was pioneered by linguists such as [|William Labov] in the US and [|Basil Bernstein] in the UK.