Dyslexia is a specific learning disability in reading and writing, which requires adequate early intervention to prevent future school failure. We describe the diagnostic assessment of a 7-year-old boy labelled "dyslexic", the evaluation of his family, social, medical, developmental, and academic status as a preliminary for the design…

My dissertation examines the ways in which composition pedagogies have, both in theory and in practice, systematically worked to exclude individuals with disabilities. Persisting in composition studies is the ideological belief that traditional writing and intelligence are somehow inherently linked, that traditional literacy is central to defining…

This response to Marni Binder reflects upon two examples of (im)migrant children's artwork and challenges the dominant notion that (im)migration experiences--and their subsequent portrayals--can be fit into neat slots. The authors position multimodal composing opportunities as affording children a vital instrument for deploying their full semiotic…

More than half of adults in the USA have quantitative literacy ratings at or below a basic level. This lack of literacy often becomes a barrier to employability. To overcome this barrier, adults are returning to college to improve their quantitative skills and complete an undergraduate education, often through an accelerated degree program. A…

This article documents what happened when a teacher in an urban school shifted classroom practice through changing participation structures to incorporate digital technology and multiple modalities into a fifth grade literacy curriculum. This shift in teacher practice provided opportunities for immigrant students to become more visible in the…

This quasi-experimental study investigated how explicit instruction about multiple modes of representation (MMR) impacted grades 7 (n = 61) and 8 (n = 141) students' learning and multimodal use on end-of-unit assessments. Half of each teacher's (n = 3) students received an intervention consisting of explicit instruction on MMR in science…

Young children frequently tell visual stories, drawing pictures to record and share their thoughts, feelings and understanding. How and what young children describe through art, especially when written language is not an option, is the focus of this interpretive analysis. A series of pictures by John, a 6-year-old boy, were drawn across the…

Case illustrations of a six-year-old boy's adventures with a missing tooth are used in this paper to re-define a broader notion of authorship. Drawing on theories of social semiotics, New Literacy Studies (NLS), and critical positioning, this notion of authorship not only interweaves the boy's preferred modes of meaning-making and communication,…

Multimodal learning clubs link principles of motivation and engagement with 21st century technological tools and texts to support content area learning. The author describes how a sixth grade health teacher and his class incorporated multimodal learning clubs into a unit of study on human body systems. The students worked collaboratively online…

Contemporary curriculum guidelines, such as those provided in the incoming Australian curriculum, call for English to attend to multimodal forms of text and literacy as well as more traditional forms. Students are expected to become capable and critical readers, users and creators of texts and forms of literacy that span everything from newspapers…

Due to variation that exists in providing Tier 2 reading intervention instruction, the purpose of the study was to identify processes and instructional strategies currently being utilized by K-2 teachers of the Gallup, New Mexico elementary schools. 17 teachers from 9 of the 10 elementary schools participated in the study. A survey instrument was…

Recent initiatives in WAC/WID and CxC/CAC programs have emphasized the need to support multimodal composing in writing studies and in other academic disciplines. This ethnographic case study examines the academic multimodal composing practices of undergraduate students in the visually-based discipline of architecture. The results of this study…

Framed in theories of social semiotics, this multiple case study describes and categorizes the actional-operational modes used by three middle school earth science teachers throughout the course of one school year. Data included fieldnotes, photographs, and video recordings of classroom instructions as well as periodic interviews with the…

The purpose of this study was to examine the changes in 19 preservice chemistry teachers' understandings of the structure of matter, including the aspects of the physical states of matter, the physical composition of matter, and the chemical composition of matter, before, immediately after, and months after they received a specific instruction.…

Teaching students to use and interpret representations in science is critically important if they are to become scientifically literate and learn how to communicate their understandings and learning in science. This study involved 248 students (119 boys and 129 girls) from 26 grade 6 teachers' classes in nine primary schools in Brisbane,…