This article explores how immigrant students in the United States utilise multimodal literacy practices to complicate dominant narratives of American national identity--narratives of facile assimilation, meritocracy and linear trajectories. Such ideologies can be explicitly evident in curricular materials or can be woven more implicitly into…

The purpose of the study was to examine the effectiveness of three remedial techniques to improve the spelling ability of students with learning disability. The three techniques, namely, TAK/v, visual orthographic method and listen, speak, read and write (LSRW) method were administered to three experimental groups, each having 13 students with…

The twenty-first century has seen the rapid emergence of wireless broadband and mobile communications devices which are inexorably changing the way people communicate, collaborate, create and transfer knowledge. Yet many higher education campus learning environments were designed and built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries prior to…

The main focus of this dissertation is the literacy practices of students in a high school International Baccalaureate (IB) English classroom. The students demonstrated their meaning of texts that were studied as part of the curriculum in order to prepare them for their Formal Oral Commentaries. This was a mandated assessment of the IB English…

The latest developments of information and communication technologies (ICT) and its large penetration in different sectors of our society pose new challenges and demands in the field of education. This special issue entitled "Designing Nordic technology-enhanced learning (TEL)", presents and discusses how researchers in the Nordic…

Various studies have demonstrated an advantage of auditory over visual text modality when learning with texts and pictures. To explain this modality effect, two complementary assumptions are proposed by cognitive theories of multimedia learning: first, the visuospatial load hypothesis, which explains the modality effect in terms of visuospatial…

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…

This article reports on a study of literacy practices in a Norwegian preschool where deaf and hearing children are enrolled in the same group and where communication is based on both sign language and spoken language. The aim of the study was to explore pathways to literacy for young deaf children within this setting. Our implicit assumption is…

The recently introduced "Australian Curriculum: English" (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), 2012) requires students to "read" multimodal text and describe the effects of structure and organisation. We begin this article by tracing the variable understandings of what reading multimodal text might…

In this article, a design-oriented, multimodal understanding of learning will be outlined. There seems to be a need for a new conceptualisation of learning in an era characterised by an increasing virtual space, blended media and new communicative patterns. This means a broader understanding of learning, and a theoretical understanding of…

In an increasingly diverse and digital society, understanding changes in contemporary communication practices that both draw from and extend beyond traditional principles of composition serves as an apt construct for exploring the nexus among youth, literacy and technology. This article will examine instances of urban youth exchanges in digital…

This qualitative study analyzed the meaning-making practices of urban adolescents participating in a college preparatory program featuring philosophical inquiry into cosmopolitanism and the creation of multimodal texts. In contrast to studies of composing that focus on individual outcomes, this dissertation traced group meaning making. The study…

This interpretive case study investigated how a fifth-grade teacher's social practices with visual and linguistic signs positioned her students (10- and 11-year-olds) to take up particular modes as they constructed digital compositions. The context of the study was a suburban public school in the northeastern United States. Analysis was threefold.…

This research investigates how three female Nigerian high school students were taught to deploy critical multimodal literacy to interrogate texts and reconstruct unequal social structures. A class of ninth-grade students in an all-women school was given instruction through the analysis of how multiple modes were used to represent meanings in…

In this article, the authors explore the corpus of literature on creative thinking and applied creativity in higher education to help composition teacher-scholars and writing center practitioners improve the application of creativity in written, visual, and multimodal composing practices. From studies of creative thinking investigated across…