Connecting Selber and Halliday

Ever since I looked at the review of Stuart Selber’s Multiliteracies for a Digital Age in Composition Forum 14.2 (Courtesy of a tip from Bradley Dilger), I have been reflecting on my notes about M. A. K. Halliday’s literacy engagements.

I have a pile of old notes on how I thought Halliday might be used to understand technology engagement from my time at ReadWriteThink when the site used Halliday to structure the site.

Halliday’s literacy engagement system (learning language, learning about language, learning through language) parallels Selber’s. There are nuances that would need worked out, but generally I think I could argue that literacy learning follows the same kinds of meaning making, even when the kinds of literacy are different. I’m just not sure that matters as an observation. What does that knowledge really bring to the conversations and scholarship on literacy?