This study examines how 31 middle-school children conducted multimodal analyses of video games. Over four consecutive days, students played video games for 30 minutes and then wrote written reflections about the multimodal symbols within the game and how these symbols influenced their interpretation and decision-making processes during gameplay.…

Qualitative stories garnered from six students with mental retardation and published autobiographical and biographical stories by people with disabilities or their parents are used as a "research synthesis" to describe an intimate, caring relationship which is of central importance when constructing a non-traditional approach to literacy that…

This article reviews research on the role of symbolic, referent, and instructional variables on the acquisition of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) symbols by individuals with autism and severe speech and language impairments. Two vignettes illustrate findings of the review. (Contains references.) (Author/DB)

New approaches are needed if educators are to deal successfully with the problem of teaching children to learn to read words well. Interesting questions come to the fore if those who seek solutions to this difficulty regard the reading of words as a subset of the wider problem of reading the class of visual signs in general, which includes (1)…