Purpose: The paper shows the interpretive impact of different constructions of the point of view available to the reader/viewer in book and animated movie versions of a children's picture book, a novel for pre-adolescents/early teenagers, and a graphic novel for adolescents and adults. Design/Approach/Methods: Excerpts from book and animated movie…

This paper extends research that looks at the intersection of multimodal composing and maker education. We present findings from a fourth iteration of a multidisciplinary classroom design study in which high school youth made digital comics based on literary novels in an 11th grade language arts classroom in a predominantly Hispanic, low-SES,…

Our understanding of reading--including reading multimodal texts--is always constrained or opened up by what we consider to be a text, what aspects of a reader's embodied activity we focus on, and how we draw a boundary around a reading event. This article brings together five literacy researchers who respond to a human-scale graphic novel,…

This article examines two comic book adaptations of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" produced for teenage readers and used in school classrooms. It seeks to understand the ways in which particular kinds of literacy are being implied and constructed through the textual practice of multimodal adaptation. It presents a close reading of sections of…

The authors present research findings from a collective case study (n=5) conducted in a multimodal composition course for pre-service English teachers. Researchers studied how a course focused on how multimodal composition influenced pre-service teachers' identities as writers and their stances on literacy instruction. Data consisted of students'…

This study analyzes how second, third, and fourth graders in a racially integrated suburban school engaged in multimodal meaning making in the context of a book club discussing Ben Hatke's graphic novel "Zita the Spacegirl." Qualitative analysis of field notes and assessments indicated three overall findings: First, students responded to…

During a classroom-based study that explored the teaching and learning of visual elements of art and design, Grade 7 students had the opportunity to read four graphic novels. Theoretically, the research was informed by social semiotics, visual literacy, sociocultural theory, and Rosenblatt's transactional theory of reading. The instructional unit…

Colour, a visual element of art and design, is a semiotic mode that is used strategically by sign-makers to communicate meaning. Understanding the meaning-making potential of colour can enhance students' understanding, appreciation, interpretation and composition of multimodal texts. This article features a case study of Anya, an 11-year-old…

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…

This article focuses on the graphic novel produced by a 12-year-old student who participated in a multifaceted study that provided her with opportunities to engage with multimodal texts. An ecological perspective on teaching and learning framed the classroom-based research that explored how developing students' knowledge of literary and…

Case illustrations of a six-year-old boy's adventures with a missing tooth are used in this paper to re-define a broader notion of authorship. Drawing on theories of social semiotics, New Literacy Studies (NLS), and critical positioning, this notion of authorship not only interweaves the boy's preferred modes of meaning-making and communication,…

This article reports the findings of a study that investigated the role of graphic novels in teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) to International Baccalaureate students (aged 15-16) in TED Ankara College Foundation Private High School. Two intact 10th grade classes were randomly assigned to the control and experimental groups who studied…