Resource+1

**Resource 1:** Website - **Tourism Australia's 29, 001 Experiences** Tourism Australia. (2010). //There's Nothing Life Australia//. Retrieved September 29, 2010, from Tourism Australia: http://www.nothinglikeaustralia.com/flash.htm#/entries



__**Description/Explanation of Resource:**__ This resource is a webpage that contains thousands of photos and some short descriptions that depict different peoples experiences of Australia. Each image description contain the tag line //there is nothing like...// and the image tells the rest of the story. There are images of people and places. Some of these are iconic, others look seem like well hidden secrets. The large volume of images gives a wide scope to just how diverse and vast Australia is.

__**Relevance to Outcome:**__ The students are working towards creating a rich multimodal task to cover the cultures outcome CUS2.3. This resource and accompanying lesson gives the students the chance to engage in exploring many different images of Australia while at the same time focusing on aspects of visual grammar that will help them to construct their rich multimodal task. By being given the chance to search through the images to find one that they connect with personally the students are given the chance to view many different experiences of what others see Australia as, as well as feeling that they themselves belong.

__**Aspect of Literacy to be Explored:**__ Through this resource students will be exploring visual literacy and its ability to convey meaning. Through this exploration students will develop their ability to decode and construct meaning from visual texts. Moreover, this resource is also an excellent example of a multimodal text through its interactive online interface. This plays an important role in the development of visual literacy as it engages students learning through the wider context of multiliteracies (Callow, 2006, p. 8), allowing for more meaningful understandings to occur as this new knowledge is applied to the increasingly familar contexts of multimodal texts such as websites. Additionally, the English syllabus also highlights the need for students to develop their visual literacy skills as an important part of the process of developing their reading skills (NSW Board of Studies, 2007). Through the reading outcomes in the syllabus, students are to develop skills in decoding visual texts, involving the understanding of the codes present in visual texts including the use of colour, angles, framing, vectors etc, all of which can be explored through the images present on this website.

This resource will be used throughout lesson 4 of our unit of work focusing on developing students visual grammar technqiues. Using this resource, students will select an image from the website, which will be used to explore in more detail, particular aspects of visual grammar, including the three dimensions of meaning contributing to how visual texts are interpreted - representational/ideational, interactive/interpersonal and compositional/textual (Unsworth, 2001, p. 72). Through this first activity, students are provided with an opportunity to explore visual images and discuss how meaning and interpretations can be formed from these images. Furthermore, through this activity, students learning and progress towards the HSIE outcome CUS2.3 is inriched as students develop the meaning making skills to interpret how visual texts have been used to contribute to the way Australia's multicultural identity has been presented.

Callow, J. (2006). Images, politics and multiliteracies: Using a visual metalanguage. //Australian Journal of Language & Literature//, 29 (1), 7-23.
 * __References:__**

NSW Board of Studies. (2007). English K-6 Syllabus. Board of Studies NSW.

Unsworth, L. (2001). //Teaching multiliteracies across the curriculum: Changing contexts of text and image in classroom practice.// Buckingham, England: Open University.