While digital multimodal composing, underpinned by a critical literacies approach, provides opportunities for students to make informed semiotic choices and voice concerns about social issues, there is limited research exploring how digital multimodal composing is employed to interrogate and challenge the entanglements of language, immigration…

This article argues that digital games and school-based literacy practices have much more in common than is reported in the research literature. We describe the role digital game paratexts--ancillary print and multimodal texts about digital games--can play in connecting pupils' gaming literacy practices to "traditional" school-based literacies…

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…

Responding to "In defence of writing" by Havard Skaar, published in issue 43.1 of this journal (April 2009), the present article argues that (1) compared with text production "from scratch," producing texts through copy-and-paste requires a different type of--rather than less--semiotic work, and that (2) digitally produced writing may involve the…

Research on implementing reading strategy instruction has primarily focused on teachers' verbal communication with limited attention to other semiotic resources such as gesture and artefacts. In this paper, we construct a "telling case" on the basis of how one primary teacher from the United States used speech, gesture and artefacts…

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 paper explores how students, as multimodal storytellers, can weave powerful narratives blending modes, genres, artefacts and literary conventions to represent the real and imagined in their lives. Part of a larger ethnographic case study of student writing in a middle years class for immigrant students learning English as an additional…

This article looks at the way in which the changing visual environment affects education at two levels: in communication patterns and research methodologies. The research considers differences in the variance and quantity of types of visual media and their relationship to the written mode in the urban landscapes of Tokyo and London, using…

Debates continue in public and in educational policy forums about the "basics" of literacy while many have not recognised that these basics may never be the same again. Rapid changes in digital communication provide facilities for reading and writing to be combined with various and often quite complex aspects of music, photography and film. At the…

This article argues that it is possible to look at children's texts in relation to the lens of literacy events and practices from the New Literacy Studies, and apply this perspective to an understanding of creativity. Teachers can then use the possibilities within a text to ask children different kinds of questions. Drawing on a 2-year…