Creating Multimodal Texts in Language Education – Negotiations at the Boundary

How students negotiate what to include, and exclude, in multimodal texts is, in this article, explored in order to find out how, and to what extent, creating multimodal texts in language education can be regarded as a literacy practice at the boundary. When students create multimodal texts in classrooms they may incorporate contextual references from domains outside of education, such as popular culture, in the multimodal texts. By incorporating contextual references from activities outside of education, the multimodal texts become boundary objects which potentially connect educational and everyday practices. Boundary objects have different meanings in different activity systems but may connect, as well as divide, the activity systems involved. By analyzing student interactions this article aims to illuminate to what extent the students relate to multimodal texts as boundary objects. The ambiguous nature of boundaries accommodates for variations which are discernible in how the students relate to, and incorporate contextual references from several literacy practices in their multimodal texts. The students sometimes utilize the multimodal text as a boundary object which connects the activity systems involved, but by excluding certain contextual references the division between the activity systems is also enacted by the students.