As literacy researchers continue to investigate how young students make sense of texts, specifically picture books, attention has expanded beyond the role that written language plays in reading comprehension to the various ways that visual images, typography, design elements, and digital devices support and challenge young readers during the act…

Reading is an important skill for work success and navigating the world today. However, the number of U.S. readers is on the decline. Between 2014 and 2018, it is estimated that approximately 720,000 Deaf readers stopped reading. When asked why, many said they didn't really enjoy reading. Such individuals are becoming what are called reluctant…

Our understanding of reading--including reading multimodal texts--is always constrained or opened up by what we consider to be a text, what aspects of a reader's embodied activity we focus on, and how we draw a boundary around a reading event. This article brings together five literacy researchers who respond to a human-scale graphic novel,…

The problem of individualization and differentiation of the learning process is still relevant in the education. The Republic of Tatarstan is a special community where many nationalities live together. In this article the problem of the text interpretation at literature lessons is on the focus of view. Leaning on the provisions, provided by…

This study analyzes how second, third, and fourth graders in a racially integrated suburban school engaged in multimodal meaning making in the context of a book club discussing Ben Hatke's graphic novel "Zita the Spacegirl." Qualitative analysis of field notes and assessments indicated three overall findings: First, students responded to…

By taking two different kinds of role playing as examples, this article explores how semiotic resources are utilised within a certain context. Regarding these role-playing activities as examples of participative narratives, we discuss how the playing and fiction interaction works as semiotic remediation practices for teenagers and young adults.…

This article analyzes the genre of the sourced comic as an important pedagogical tool in the development of both alphabetic and multimodal literacies. We argue that sourced comics provide multiple design elements with which students can explore their complex relationships with scholarly sources, make visible various power relations informing…

During a classroom-based study that explored the teaching and learning of visual elements of art and design, Grade 7 students had the opportunity to read four graphic novels. Theoretically, the research was informed by social semiotics, visual literacy, sociocultural theory, and Rosenblatt's transactional theory of reading. The instructional unit…

To explore the multimodality of two representative EFL textbook series for Chinese college students, their visual and verbal semiotic modes were compared. The target textbooks are "Experiencing English" and "New Century College English". Through multimodal discourse analysis, the study aims to shed some light on how to develop…

Freebody and Luke proffered an expanded conceptualization of the resources readers utilize when reading and the roles readers adopt during the act of reading. The four resources model, and its associated four roles of the reader, expanded the definition of reading from a simple model of decoding printed texts to a model of constructing meaning and…

Explicit pedagogy that focuses on visual design and composition principles can affect students' responses to and understanding, interpretation and analysis of images, as well as the creation of their own visual representations. This article considers the why, the what, and the how of teaching various visual elements of art and design to students…

In our essay we discuss Louise Rosenblatt's transactional theory of a reading event. Second, we summarize Carole Cox and Joyce Many who applied the transactional theory and designed a 1-5 point continuum to stories and films. Third, we summarize film theorists David Bordwell's constructivism; Richard Wollheim's central imagining and…

From the original performances of Shakespeare's plays and the illustrated title page of his First Folios, to the current day use of YouTube, mobile phones and tablets, multimodal texts have been apparent across Western cultures. The rapid development over the last 20 years of technology has markedly increased access to a much broader array of…

This article reports on the use of a text-based verbal protocol (Afflerbach, 2000) situated within individual interviews to elicit secondary English teachers' perspectives on new literacies (Albers & Harste, 2007; Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2008). Ranging significantly in their teaching experience and comfort with new media and…

An extensive body of scholarship has documented the way disciplinary texts and activities are produced and mediated through their relationship to a wide array of extradisciplinary discourses. This article seeks to complement and extend that line of work by drawing upon Witte's (1992) notion of intertext to address the way disciplinary activities…