Previous studies have pointed to the benefits of involving students' everyday life experiences in lessons and in contextualizing the science content to enhance learning and positive attitudes toward school science. However, most of these investigations have been conducted as intervention studies. By contrast, the present study explored how…

This article argues that theoretical understandings of multimodality have enormous potential for assessment purposes in secondary school contexts. Informed by the work of three researchers in three North American high schools, the article offers vignettes of the effective assessment of communicative competence in English classrooms that draws on…