Developing understanding and appreciation of literature and critical reading concepts through multimodal approaches

Traditional monomodal or singular modes of presentation of information in the literature classroom often pose dfficulties for students as they are normally based on texts and textual information. Based on experience, capturing students? attention with a mainly linguistic based lecture format poses a challenging task. As such it is felt that if we continue to use the traditional single modal approach in teaching the end result is a limited engendering of conceptual understanding of critical concepts. It is therefore crucial that new applications of learning styles and strategies be incorporated into the literature classroom so that these problems can be addressed. This paper reports on the preliminary findings of an ongoing research project that is based on the introduction of a multimodal approach to teach conceptual understanding of literary theories and concepts