Peirce called signs (things that we recognize) that “mean” because they resemble other things we’ve experienced before “icons.” You see this And recognize it as a “book” because of its resemblance to other objects in a class that in English we call “books”:

Peirce called signs that “mean” through their association in time and space with other signs “indexes” You hear this: And recognize it as a siren because of its association with the presence of this:

Peirce called signs like these “symbols.” This is the part of his theory that partly overlaps with other theories you may have heard of, like the work of Saussure on language. You see this: 5 And it represents the concept of “five-ness” to you: Or you hear this:

A largely unarticulated but felt sense of the presence of meaning (an intuition, an unexplored emotion) Awwwww….

An informational, relational sense of presence Note that an index often combines icons or words (symbols). It is the placement of the sign near danger that makes this sign an index, not the figures that are drawn. The figure itself is an icon of how to properly feed a child to a crocodile.

Ideas that are fully articulated and that are understood through the use of other symbols. “Let’s discuss…”

Multimodal texts provide a more complete and authentic experience of a topic as well. They not only “hit you” at a lot of different levels of cognition, those levels SUPPORT each other.

For this reason, multimodality is a Godsend to:  struggling readers  students who speak English as a second or third language (ELLs)  even to proficient readers who are being presented a complex topic for which they have little or weak prior knowledge.

That’s right. Multimodality is Da Bomb, too.