As classrooms worldwide become diverse, the ways teachers engage children in literacy learning must be inclusive to accommodate the multitude of languages spoken. Multimodal literacy practices using digital tools provide innovative opportunities for emergent bilinguals to express their meaning-making processes. This paper details a year-long…

Literacy practices have changed over the past several years to incorporate modes of representation much broader than language alone, in which the textual is also related to the visual, the audio, the spatial, etc. This book focuses on research and instructional practices necessary for integrating an expanded view of literacy in the classroom that…

One of the purposes of the classroom-based research featured in this article was to explore how the ongoing development of young children's understanding of elements of visual art and design would affect their comprehension, interpretation and analysis of the artwork in a selection of picturebooks. Social semiotics, multimodality, sociocultural…

This article shares the authors' work with first graders and how, through various reading, writing, and art experiences around picturebooks, the children learned to read and communicate through art along with written language. The work is grounded in multimodality theory and the belief that all modes (particularly art for the purposes of this…

Classroom discussions of multimodal texts, in particular historical fiction picturebooks, offer an interpretive space where readers are positioned to construct meanings in transaction with the written language, visual images, and design elements created by authors, illustrators and publishers (Serafini & Ladd, 2008; Sipe, 1999). This study was…