The term Multiliteracies, coined by the New London Group 20 years ago, refers to the new literacies and forms of meaning making, namely the literacies and forms of linguistic, visual, audio, spatial and gestural meaning making. The necessity of multiliteracies in understanding of multiple discourses and forms of communications derives from the cultural and linguistic diversity of the modern society and the dramatic change in the communication technologies. In the following short video an active kindergarten teacher explains that the internationality of the classroom where she found herself in, and the differantiation in the experiences of the students, necessitates the introduction of multiliteracies in her instruction.

While multiliteracies from a pedagogical perpective is a mode of meaning making, it is also considered a mode of learning, meaning that the learners have the obligation to aquire the skill of understanding the contemporary means of communication and become critical consumers of the information they encounter, and become effective producers of multimodal knowlegde, but at the same time they can use multiliteracies as a means to learn more effectively and have a deep content understanding. 

The Multiliteracies are characterized of four aspects all intertwined with each other: Situated Practice, Overt Instruction, Critical Framing, and Transformed Practice. As Situated Practice is considered "learning that is grounded into stundents' own life experiences" [1] and there are two types of experiencing in the process of learning: experiencing the known (use the learners own past experiences), and experiencing the new (teach the concept through experiencial procedures, like experiments, field trips and many more). The following video depicts a modern tool of Situated Practice, vurtual reality in the classroom to enhance experiencing the new.

In order for Situated Practice to be effective, the New London Group emphasized the importance of the other aspects of multiliteracies, one of which is Overt Instruction. Overt Instruction is the direct teaching of "metalanguages" aspiring to the aquisition by the learner of the ability to understand the underlying components of expressive forms (form, context, function) or grammars. An example of Overt Instruction, explaned by Dr B. Cope and M. Kalatzis, in their 2001 featured article in the Newsletter of the Australian Literacy Educators' Association, is the analysis of the multimodal grammar of one song, as part of the teaching - learning process about video clips. The students with the assistace of the teacher could understand the metalanguages of a video clip: the meaning making of the lyrics, and the contribution of the song and the gestures of the singer to that meaning. From this point of view the process of Overt Instruction is a collaborative process and a process that scafolds Situated Practice, in a way that the students not only learn the metalanguages of the songs the teacher selected, but this concsious unerstanding can be used in the future as an experiential element for new instruction. 

Another aspect of Multiliteracies is Critical Framing that requires the "investigation of the socio-cultural contexts and purposes of learning and designs of meaning" [1]. Adding to the previous exapmle, the students may at this stage investigate the differantiations on the meaning of the songs in different kinds of music, or the change of the meaning of the lyrics of one song when they are covered with different types of music, or performed by different singers of various nationalities. 

The last aspect of Multiliteracies is Transformed Practice. The learners are enganged in practices based on new understandings of literacy practices. In other words, the teachers may re-create activities according to the lifeworld of the learners in order for the latter to apply their learning and reflect on that. For instance, during the teaching - learning process of a lesson regarding volcanos, the students may first be asked to recall memories of being in a volcano (perhaps in Hawaii) and then describe the volcano, or be part of a vitrual trip and immerse into the new knowledge if they dont have previous experiences, and then be asked to simulate an active volcano with tools they can find in the kitchen (for instance an empty recycled plastic bottle, covered with dough and painted in the colors of a mountain, and a red colored mixture of acid and soda, that when poured into the bottle comes out, resembling lava coming out of the volcano.) But the new thing in the e- learning environments is that the students can capture this and produce their video where the students themselves describe this natural phenomenon. 

References 

[1] Multiliteracy wikipedia article

[2] Video on multiliteracies in the classroom