Over the last several decades, forms of reading have expanded far beyond conventional print-based text to include multimodal representational forms rooted in new practices and contexts (Miller, 2007) including a variety of text formats within technologies. This rapidly changing digital landscape has impacts on the ways in which students engage with, and teachers incorporate, other non-print mediums particularly for primary aged students learning how to read. This dissertation explores questions regarding text types across three studies. The first chapter and study is a systematic research synthesis examining research published between 1996 when the call for multimodal literacies was first made, until 2022. Findings reveal 33 kindergarten-5th grade studies classroom studies focused explicitly on multimodal instructional approaches to teaching literacy. Findings reveal 74 research questions have been asked, and 102 research findings have been found across five themes: multimodal compositions, reading multimodal texts, empowerment through multimodality, impacts of multimodal instruction on student learning, and multimodal pedagogy. The second chapter, a mixed methods study, examines one small group of 5th grade multilingual students identified as struggling with engagement in reading, and their interactions with one another and their teacher as they engaged in text-based discussions using three kinds of text types: print-only, print-plus image, and video-only. This study finds talk distributions to be consistent with the literature on student and teacher talk with no statistically significant difference between text types. Student and teacher talk moves were found to vary little between text types, though higher rates of instructing moves were found to be statistically different from print-only and print-plus image texts. Video-only engagement for students was rated overwhelmingly higher as compared to other text types. Using a discourse analysis approach combined with descriptive and inferential statistics, the third chapter and study compares the degree to which Collaborative Reasoning lessons were dialogic, the dialogic moves used, and the percentage of overall student talk during nine dialogic discussions focused on three types of text: print-only, print-plus image, and video-only across three groups of 5th grade students with varying language and literacy profiles. This study finds a positive statistically significant difference in the degree of dialogicality when discussing multimodal texts as compared to print-only, and highlights how multilingual students showcase their rich and sophisticated linguistic repertoires through the use of various dialogic moves during text-based discussions with multimodal texts. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]