Reading multimodal (popularized) scientific texts is studied predominantly in terms of said-to-be-required technical decoding skills. In this article I suggest that there are other interesting approaches to studying the reading of multimodal (popularized) scientific texts, approaches that are grounded in social psychological concerns. These…

Second-generation cultural-historical activity theory, which drew its inspiration from Leont'ev's work, constituted an advance over Vygotsky's first-generation theory by explicitly articulating the dialectical relation between individual and collective. As part of an effort to develop third-generation-historical activity theory, I propose in this…