We contend that multimodal literary responses offer a space for students to integrate art in the interactive composing process in a way that fosters creativity that normative schooling practices often foreclose. In this qualitative study of three African American fifth-grade students' design processes, we theorize literacy as embodied to analyse…

In a previous phase of a project based in a group of UK primary schools, speaking and listening was found to be an effective focus for improved learning across the curriculum and for teachers' professional development. At the project's second stage and in the light of recently changed Department for Education guidelines, these findings have been…

This article reports the results of an ethnographic research about the multimodal science discourse in a sixth-grade sheltered classroom involving English Language Learners (ELLs) only. Drawing from the perspective of multimodality, this study examines how science learning is constructed in science lectures through multiple semiotic resources,…

Research and pedagogical information provided to teachers on implementing explicit strategy instruction has primarily focused on teachers' speech, with limited attention to other modes of communication, such as gesture and artefacts. This interpretive case study investigates two teachers' use of different semiotic resources when introducing…

This article explores the experiences and literacy practices of an adolescent boy enrolled in an academic support class, in which students received an open-ended invitation to respond to S.E. Hinton's novel "The Outsiders" with the software programme Comic Life. In constructing this "telling case", we highlight how traditional…

The role of interest in educational settings has been seen as a significant factor in nurturing an appreciation for learning and influencing the extent to which that learning occurs. Interest can be divided into two sub-categories, individual interest and situational interest. Individual interest is personal rather than global, slow to develop,…

Literate practice in the arts encompasses both aesthetics and creativity. It is also multimodal in nature and often collaborative. This article presents data collected from a small multi-age school, with children from Prep to Year 7, during their preparation for an end-of-year show. The children had studied the topics of conservation and…

This paper draws from research conducted as part of an Australian Research Council funded Linkage Project "Teaching effective 3D authoring in the middle years: multimedia grammatical design and multimedia authoring pedagogy", which is a collaboration between the University of New England, the University of Tasmania and the Australian…

Evidence-based Practice Guidelines for Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) and Literacy and Learning are derived from an inductive analysis of qualitative data collected in field research. FASD is the umbrella term for a spectrum of neurocognitive and physical disabilities caused by prenatal exposure to alcohol. Data from a sample of N =150 was…

The purpose of the study reported on here was to explore ways in which the interactive whiteboard (IWB) can support students' understanding of texts. A Year 3 and a Year 4 primary school class in New South Wales, Australia, is the focus of the research. A qualitative case study was carried out using multimodal analysis focusing on the use of an…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the ways second grade children signaled the meanings they made from pictures and print and to identify ways they signaled new meanings when transmediations between these two semiotic systems took place. The study was a mixed methods study using qualitative methods in a case study format for the first…

Theme-based learning (TBL) refers to learning modes which adopt the following sequence: (a) finding the theme; (b) finding a focus of interest based on the theme; (c) finding materials based on the focus of interest; (d) integrating the materials to establish shared knowledge; (e) publishing and sharing the integrated knowledge. We have created an…