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Areas of expertise: literacy education from pre-school to matriculation; children’s and adolescent’s literature and literacy development; e-literature for children and adolescents; information and communication technology and literacies; multiliteracies; language and literacy in curriculum areas; systemic functional linguistics in literary and literacy research and education; functional grammar in school curriculum; genre theory; semiosis of explanation in education
HDR Supervisor accreditation status: Full
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-4723-8169
Phone: +612 9739 2738
Email: len.unsworth@acu.edu.au
Location: ACU North Sydney Campus
Professor Len Unsworth is the Research Director of Educational Semiotics in English and Literacy Pedagogy at ILSTE. Len has been involved in educational research for over 30 years, including nine recent Australian Research Council funded projects. His key research interests include: literacy and learning in school curriculum areas; literature for children and adolescents; literacy development in the English curriculum K-12; and the pedagogic role of explicit knowledge about language and the meaning-making resources of images and image-language interaction in both paper and digital media texts, including animation and film. Prior to commencing at ACU in 2014, Len was Professor in Education at Griffith University, following earlier roles as Head of the School of Education at the University of New England and Head of the School of Development and Learning in the Faculty of Education at the University of Sydney.
Unsworth, L. (Ed.). (2020). Learning from Animations in Science Education: Innovating in Semiotic and Educational Research. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
Unsworth, L., & Thomas, A. (2014). English teaching and new literacies pedagogy: Interpreting and authoring digital multimedia narratives. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing.
Unsworth, L., Tytler, R., Fenwick, L., Humphrey, S., Chandler, P., Herrington, M., & Lam, P. (in press/2021). Multimodal Literacy in School Science: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Theory, Research and Pedagogy: Routledge.
Macken-Horarik, M., Love, K., Unsworth, L. & Sandiford, C. (2017). Functional Grammatics: Re- conceptualizing knowledge about language and image for school English. London: Routledge.
Painter, C., Martin, J. R., & Unsworth, L. (2013). Reading visual narratives: Image analysis of children’s picture books. London, UK: Equinox.
Unsworth, L., Tytler, R., & Fenwick, L. (in press). Methodological Challenges for Collaborative Research in Senior Science Classrooms. In P. White, R. Tytler, J. Cripps Clark & J. Ferguson (Eds.), Methodological Approaches to STEM Education Research (Vol. 2). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars.
Martin, J. R., Unsworth, L., & Rose, D. (in press). Condensing meaning: Imagic aggregations in secondary school science. In G. Parodi (Ed.), Multimodality: From corpus to cognition. London: Bloomsbury
Unsworth, L. (2020). A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Animation Design and Use in Science Education. In L. Unsworth (Ed.), Learning from Animations in Science Education: Innovating in Semiotic and Educational Research (pp. 3-24). Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
Yu, M., Feng, D., & Unsworth, L. (2020). Infusing pro-environmental values in science education: A multimodal analysis of attitudinal meaning in ecology animations for children. In L. Unsworth (Ed.), Learning from Viewing and Creating Animations in School Science: Innovative Developments in Semiotic and Educational Research (pp. 55-74). Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
Unsworth, L. (2020). Intermodal relations, mass and presence in school science explanation genres. In Michele Zappavigna & S. Dreyfus (Eds.), Discourses of hope and reconciliation: J. R. Martin’s contributions to Systemic Functional Linguistics (pp. 131-152). London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Mills, K. A., Unsworth, L., & Barton, G. (2019). The digital mediation of emotions in late modernity. In R. Putulny, A. Bellocchi, R. Olson, S. Khorana, J. McKenzie, & M. Peterie (Eds.), Emotions in late modernity (pp.190-208). Routledge Studies in the Sociology of Emotions. London, UK: Routledge/ CRC Press. [LP150100030, 2015–18]
Ge, Y., Unsworth, L. & Wang, K., Chang, H. (2018). Image design for enhancing science learning: Helping students build taxonomic meanings with salient tree structure images. In K. Tang & K. Danielsson (Eds.), Global Developments in Literacy Research for Science Education (pp. 237-258). Switzerland: Springer.
Ngo, T., Unsworth, L., & Herrington, M. (Accepted). Teacher Orchestration of Language and Gesture in Explaining Science Concepts in Images. Research in Science Education.
Unsworth, L. (2021). High School Science Infographics: Multimodal Meaning Complexes in Composite Image-Language Ensembles. Pensamiento Educativo, Revista de Investigación Educacional Latinoamericana (PEL), 58(2).
Mills, K. A., Stone, B. G., Unsworth, L., & Friend, L. (2020). Multimodal Language of Attitude in Digital Composition. Written Communication, 37(2), 135-166.
Unsworth, L., & Mills, K. A. (2020). English language teaching of attitude and emotion in digital multimodal composition. Journal of Second Language Writing, 47, 100712. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2020.100712
Unsworth, L., Cope, J., & Nicholls, L. (2019). Multimodal literacy and large-scale literacy tests: Curriculum relevance and responsibility, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 42(2),128-139.
Mills, K.A. & Unsworth, L. (2018). iPad animations: Powerful multimodal practices for adolescent literacy and emotional language. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 61(6), 609-62.
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