The purpose of this study was to investigate the cognitive and multimodal strategies used by adolescent students as they read comic texts and traditional prose texts. This study looked at the strategies employed by adolescents in an eighth-grade English class. The cognitive and multimodal strategies that the participants used while reading were divided into subcategories for both cognitive and multimodal strategies. The corpus of data was collected through four primary methods. Videotaped classroom interactions, worksheets completed by the participants, audio-recorded one-on-one interviews, and personal audio-recorded field notes were the four sources of data collection. The goal in analyzing these sources of data was to see how the participants used cognitive and multimodal strategies to make sense of the texts that they were reading. Data was collected over a three-month period. Six participants agreed to participate for this study. The videotaped classroom interactions were taken at the same time the participants were given worksheets to complete. Data analysis included transcribing the videotaped classroom interactions, transcribing the one-on-one interviews, and scanning the written documents so that these sources of data could be analyzed. Instances of participants applying a cognitive or multimodal strategy were identified and coded. Cognitive and multimodal strategies each were broken down into three sub-categories. The sub-categories for cognitive strategies were summarizing, inferring, and visualizing; the sub-categories for multimodal strategies were visual, spatial, and semiotic. Each of these sub-categories was broken down further so that a specific strategy employed by the participants could be identified. The findings of this study indicate that in all cognitive and multimodal strategies, the participants used these strategies more for comics than they did for traditional prose. This study also highlights the need for expanded understandings of literacy and what it means to be literate in the 21st century. Students can incorporate a variety of strategies to engage with a text regardless of the text they are reading. These findings indicate that teachers, policymakers, and researchers can benefit from including more multimodal texts into educational settings and research. Findings indicate that significant strategies used in both prose and comics were that identifying key information, reading between the lines, and making a coherent visuospatial map of what was happening in the text were the most dominant cognitive strategies that were used for traditional prose and for comics. Findings also indicate that image inferring, effective communication of ideas, and using the linguistic-gestural form of communication as the dominant semiotic strategies. Broadly speaking, these strategies were used consistently across the mediums of comics and traditional prose. The most frequently used strategy across both mediums was a cognitive strategy; the inferential strategy of reading between the lines was used more often than any other strategy. [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.]