Image–language interaction in online reading environments: challenges for students’ reading comprehension

This paper presents the qualitative results of a study of students’ reading of multimodal texts in an interactive, online environment. The study forms part of a larger project which addressed image–language interaction as an important dimension of language pedagogy and assessment for students growing up in a multimedia digital age. Thirty-two Year 6 students representing a sample of high, medium and low performers on an Australian state-wide school literacy test were surveyed about their internet usage and interviewed using a structured protocol while working online through a selection of materials from an educational website. Findings from the earlier stages of the project indicated that different types of image-text relations vary in the degree of difficulty they pose for students’ reading comprehension. This phase of the project extended the analysis of image-text relations to online, interactive texts. Student performance on online reading tasks and interview data are used to illustrate some of the complexities students encounter when reading online, and how this may vary with factors such as their day-to-day literacy experiences and levels of engagement. The results have implications for literacy pedagogy and assessing the reading of web-based texts.     

Meaning‐making with colour in multimodal texts: an 11‐year‐old student's purposeful ‘doing’

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 student who participated in a classroom‐based research project that explored developing student visual meaning‐making skills and competencies by focusing specifically on a selection of visual elements of art and design in picture books and graphic novels. Excerpts from Anya's interview about her multimodal print text revealed that her intentional use of colour was affected by her participation in the learning opportunities afforded during the explorative study that included overt instruction about making meaning with colour. The semiotic analysis of Anya's use of colour in her multimodal text included a consideration of how the various distinctive features of colour were evident in her work. The article concludes with a discussion of pedagogical and assessment issues associated with teaching students about colour and other visual elements of art and design.     

Children writing: Multimodality and assessment in the writing classroom

Multimedia has had a widely recognised impact on society, but it is still under‐represented in the literacy pedagogies of many schools. This may relate to the way we view assessment for literacy, which is still almost wholly monomodal. Students assessed at a low level as producers of verbal text may respond positively when working multimodally, but the only assessment instruments we have do not reveal this. In a class of 26 ten‐year‐olds in Victoria, Australia, with rich access to computers, five children performed at a very low level when working with verbal expression only, but responded remarkably when invited to work multimodally. A programme of text production was monitored and the results analysed, progressing from handwritten monomodal work, through stages of multimodality to full multimodal expression. The results suggest strongly that some children need multimodal scaffolding in order to communicate complex ideas effectively. This, however, requires an acceptance of multimodal texts as part of the primary literacy curriculum. It is therefore suggested that assessment of multimodal composition, both narrative and other texts, should be developed to help teachers accept the value of introducing multimodal literacies into the classroom.     

A ‘Multimodal Ecology of Text’ in Advanced Level English Language examinations? The incorporation of graphology and ‘embodied’ facsimile texts in unit test papers and their assessment since 2001

In this paper we compare the representation of texts in a sample of Advanced Level English Language examination papers set over the past decade in order to explore the changes in ‘what constitutes English and its assessment’. Prior to the year 2000, texts used in most A Level Language examination papers were usually typeset in a word processed format stripped of original font, layout, accompanying images, and colour, and devoid of the material marks of the texts' ‘history’ and materiality. From 2001, the texts for AQA B examination papers¹ have been reproduced in facsimile form to include the original graphology used. This shift in production in the materiality of embodiment has led to a corresponding shift in assessment in the codes of recognition of what constitutes English text, and what counts as English response. The sample of texts that we discuss present an ‘ecology of text’ and an ‘ecology of texts and literacy practices’ on a ‘continuum of multimodality’: from the heavily edited, word processed, linguistically circumscribed texts of the 1990s examination papers, through to the more visually‐dependent texts of 2004 with their manner of writing, typographic detail, colour, and sometimes even complete with creases and stains. Taking a multimodal approach to these texts, we discuss the implications of this change for what is being required of students analysing texts for examination assessment and more broadly for the subject ‘English’ ‐ ‘what English is’. We also consider how this shift problematizes the English work of students, teachers, examiners, and the institutions in which these agents operate.     

Grade 7 Students Reading Graphic Novels: ‘You Need To Do a Lot of Thinking’

A multifaceted, classroom‐based research project explored how developing Grade 7 students’ knowledge of literary and illustrative elements affects their understanding, interpretation and analysis of picturebooks and graphic novels, and their subsequent creation of their own print texts. Analysis of two sources of data, the students’ written responses to Amulet ( Kibuishi 2008 ), one of the graphic novels read and discussed during the study, and the students’ opinions about the knowledge that is required to read and understand a graphic novel, indicated how the instruction about various graphic novel conventions had impacted the students’ awareness of and knowledge about the structural design of these multimodal texts.     

Multimodal texts in Higher Education and the implications for writing pedagogy

Although studies on writing pedagogy and academic literacies have examined changing genres in tertiary education, there has not necessarily been an emphasis on how a range of modes and media have influenced texts in various disciplines. This paper explores the influence and incorporation of the visual into student texts in Higher Education, looking at the semiotic weighting of modes, conventions and functions of images, visual / verbal linkages and visual composition. These aspects of multimodal texts have implications for the ways in which we teach ‘academic literacies’ practices and writing as multimodal composition to students.     

Empowering English as an Additional Language students through digital multimodal composing

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 status and power. This article explores how 23 primary-aged English as an Additional Language (EAL) students (Years 3–6) engaged in digital multimodal composing, in the context of an after-school multiliteracies programme in one Australian school. Conceptualising critical literacies as a bridge to access and transform codes of power, the article explores how the participating students selected and used different semiotic resources for their digital texts while challenging and redefining dominant discourses based on their lived experiences and interests. The study found that both students and pre-service teachers found value in students having access to digital technologies and experimenting with a range of multimodal and multilingual resources to create digital texts, which reflected cultural and linguistic identities. The findings illustrate how the creation of digital multimodal and multilingual texts allows for opportunities for students to reposition themselves as knowledgeable and active meaning-makers with strategic support from teachers and peers.     

The effect of peer assessment on project performance of students at different learning levels

Peer assessment has been increasingly integrated in educational settings as a strategy to foster student learning. Yet little has been studied about how students at different learning levels may benefit from peer assessment. This study examined how peer-assessment and students’ learning levels influenced students’ project performance using a two-way factorial design. One hundred and thirty teacher education students participated in this quasi-experimental study. When working on a technology-integrated lesson plan project, the experimental group completed an online peer assessment process while the control group followed the discussion method. Students’ learning levels were measured and divided into low, average and high achieving according to the quality of their draft lesson plans. Data analysis suggested that the impact of peer assessment on students’ lesson plan project seemed to vary according to students’ learning levels. While low- and average-achieving students showed significantly improved performance right after the integration of a peer assessment model, the model seemed to have had less impact on the performance of high-achieving students. Significance, implications and limitations of findings are discussed.     

Multimodal Representations in Senior Biology Assessments: A Case Study of NSW Australia

This paper investigates the use of multimodal representations to assess biological understanding in the final senior secondary school public examination in New South Wales, Australia. The investigation emanates from a larger Australian study concerned with the impact of disciplinary and technological innovations on science pedagogy, particularly in molecular genetics where much knowledge is represented in modalities other than, or in conjunction with, language and traditional print-based texts and visuals. The availability of digital technologies and their affordances for the learning and teaching of senior high school Biology now makes it realistic for examiners to include multimodal representations in assessment tasks. A qualitative analysis of final-year Biology examination papers from 2001 to 2013 identified and classified the multimodal representations included in this written external examination. Findings indicate that despite the ready availability of multimodal, multimedia representations in classroom learning and curriculum materials, and evidence of students’ engagement with ICT, the high-stakes examinations make little use of such resources. A consequence of this mismatch between curriculum outcomes and assessment tools is that students may be disadvantaged because their in-depth knowledge and understanding of biological concepts is not effectively demonstrated through traditional pen-and-paper tests. A move towards a range of alternative assessment formats is one way to ensure that assessment aligns with multimodal learning in the classroom.     

Children's writing goes 3D: a case study of one primary school's journey into multimodal authoring

This paper draws from research conducted as part of an Australian Research Council funded Linkage Project ‘Teaching effective 3D authoring in the middle years: multimedia grammatical design and multimedia authoring pedagogy’, which is a collaboration between the University of New England, the University of Tasmania and the Australian Children's Television Foundation. This project is being conducted in over 20 schools around Australia. The data presented in this paper focuses on one such school, located in Tasmania. It explores one school's endeavour in the teaching and learning of multimodal narrative. Data includes interviews from students and multimodal analysis of student narratives. The paper showcases the kinds of semiotic choices the children are making for their stories, and includes excerpts from the interviews to illustrate how they are able to articulate justifications for their choices. In particular, it focuses on how children are establishing literary concepts such as genre, characterisation and point of view using all semiotic resources. In doing so, it considers the pedagogy behind the creations to explore how effectively it works as children create new kinds of texts which are innovative, critical, creative and ‘of quality’.     

Middle-school students reading and creating multimodal texts: a case study

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 illustrative elements affects their understanding, interpretation and analysis of picturebooks and graphic novels, and the subsequent creation of their own print multimodal texts. During a 10-week period, 25 Grade 7 students participated in interdependent reading, writing and oral activities that offered them opportunities to learn about metafictive devices, some art elements and a few compositional principles of graphic novels. For the culminating activity of the study, the students created their own multimodal print texts. The in-depth analysis of one student's graphic novel reveals how her participation and engagement in a particular classroom community of practice affected her learning of the content and concepts under study.     

Assessing visual literacy: a case study of developing a rubric for identifying and applying criteria to undergraduate student learning

Higher education has traditionally privileged language-based text as evidence of students’ levels of critical thinking and literacy. Twenty-first century education at all levels however, has focused on multimodal literacies and how educators can engage students who are seeing the world through diverse representations and a myriad of forms. Many scholars maintain that we live in a visual culture where we are becoming increasingly proficient at reading images of all kinds. However, our criteria for assessing student learning and measures of assessment have not moved much beyond the traditional written texts outside art and design disciplines. While much has been written about the role of visual literacy, there is little research on assessing visual literacy competencies. This paper proposes a Visual Literacy Competency (VLC) rubric based on the Biggs and Collis (1982. Evaluating the Quality of Learning: The SOLO Taxonomy (Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome). New York: Academic Press) SOLO taxonomy and describes applications for assessing assignments in two undergraduate communications courses with a focus on further developing and shaping student learning.     

Multimodality,learning and decision-making: children's metacognitive reflections on their engagement with video games as interactive texts

This study examines how 31 middle-school children conducted multimodal analyses of video games. Over four consecutive days, students played video games for 30 minutes and then wrote written reflections about the multimodal symbols within the game and how these symbols influenced their interpretation and decision-making processes during gameplay. Students produced 124 reflections in total, which were analysed via template analysis to determine how children metacognitively reflected on different types of multimodal symbols and used those symbols to comprehend the games and make decisions. Results illustrate how students engaged in metacognitive semantic and syntactic processes with a variety of multimodal symbols, such as written language, dynamic visuals and abstract symbols, during gameplay that aided their understanding of the games and influenced their decisions. This study contributes to the limited empirical research on video game literacies and illustrates children's meaning-making processes while engaged with video games as multimodal interactive texts.     

‘GetReel’: engaging Year 6 students in planning,scripting, actualising and evaluating media text

The notion of ‘multiliteracies’ and the development and creation of multimodal texts within classrooms is of pedagogic interest in this age of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). The case study reported herein provides an analysis of how one teacher engaged her class of primary school students as they responded to the challenge of creating and filming a 30‐second television commercial on a social justice issue. The media texts were constructed in a 10‐week period. The paper describes the process as the teacher and these students planned, wrote, filmed and edited their commercials. It offers an example of how the changing nature of literacy and, specifically, text, is enacted in the classroom.     

Pedagogy in the multimodal classroom: an analysis of the challenges and opportunities for teachers

Contemporary commentary notes that students are frequently ahead of their teachers in their ability to manipulate and be creative with the internet, digital programs, and mobile technology. In this context it is important to ask, ‘What knowledge do teachers need to teach in the contemporary context where texts are elaborately multimodal, constructed not just of print but of image, sound, and movement?’ This paper proposes some signposts to assist teachers with navigating in this environment. Using teachers’ and researchers’ reflections on practices in a diverse range of settings, both primary and secondary, the analysis explicates the challenges that teachers face in this multimodal context and elucidates some ways they can effectively operate within it. In particular, it argues that it is teachers’ expertise as analysts and critics of texts that needs to guide their planning and teaching in this ‘new’ text world.     

In the eye of the beholder: The relationship between perceived peer language skills,provided peer feedback and peer grading in secondary education

Students involved in peer assessment have interpersonal relationships, partly consisting of reciprocal perceptions. In the domain of argumentative writing, little is known about the way peer assessment is affected by the assessor’s perception of the assessee’s language skills. Dutch 10th grade students (N = 176, age = 15–16) provided feedback and grades on two texts, being under the illusion that the texts had been written by two classmates whom the assessors perceived as a peer with either stronger or weaker language skills than their own (within-subjects design). In reality, students assessed similar texts, created by the researchers. Assessors did not provide different feedback to the two types of assessees. Simultaneously, they provided higher grades to peers perceived to have stronger language skills than their own than to peers perceived to have weaker language skills than their own. Future research should capture assessors’ rationale behind the composition of feedback and grades.     

The multi‐modal redesign of school texts

Multiliteracies‐related research is just emerging from the formal discourse of pedagogical theorising and how it may look in practice needs further exploration. This research, initiated under that warrant, presents practitioner research and the enactment of a multiliteracies curriculum with Year 8 students in New York City's Chinatown. The study describes a collaborative digital literacies project with a local contemporary arts museum where students engaged in the multi‐modal redesign of school texts. First, the article outlines a move of multiliteracies theory into curriculum practice where students explored questions of Chinese‐American and immigrant identities through a discourse analysis of history texts. Then, drawing on a digital gothic and hip‐hop cartoon Web project, it outlines how students challenged ways their ethnic identities were positioned by drawing political satire cartoons about immigration to the United States. The project concluded with a virtual exhibition of students' artwork where they inserted their cartoons within existing educational websites using HTML and Flash. It argues that the redesigned websites are a new set of multi‐modal literacy practices that allow youth to disrupt racist and exclusionary discourses they encounter in school texts and their lived experiences.     

E‐assessment within the Bologna paradigm: evidence from Portugal

The Bologna Declaration brought reforms into higher education that imply changes in teaching methods, didactic materials and textbooks, infrastructures and laboratories, etc. Statistics and mathematics are disciplines that traditionally have the worst success rates, particularly in non‐mathematics core curricula courses. This research project, Mathematics and Statistics for the Development of Professional Skills, which is in progress at the University of Beira Interior in Portugal, has as one of its main objectives the development of the e‐assessment system as a resource for learning assessment and student self‐regulation. Based on the results of the above‐mentioned project, this paper will give evidence of how to improve the reliability of an e‐assessment system, show that e‐assessment can be a good alternative to open‐ended tests and that students tend to show a positive attitude towards its use. We show that this can be done by checking the internal consistency and measurement error of the e‐assessment tests, the analysis of the association between student scores obtained by different methods of assessment and the analysis of data survey on student opinion about e‐assessment methods.     

Orchestrating debate: a multimodal analysis of classroom interaction

This paper examines the ways in which the interpretation of a literary text is constructed through social interaction in a multi‐ethnic urban secondary school English classroom. The focus is on the literacy experiences of Year 10 students (age 14 to 15 years). We take a multimodal approach to understanding social interaction around texts and show that higher‐order literacy skills are realised and constructed through the configuration of talk and writing with a range of other representational and communicational modes, such as gesture, gaze, movement, and posture. We suggest that despite the exhaustive regulation of literacy and school English, some English teachers, while still curriculum and examination focused, have found strategies that give them space to make connections between texts and the experiences of their particular student intake. They do so in ways that link to wider social and moral issues, drawing on their own and their students' life experiences, to make cultural connections with the texts studied. The paper shows how a multimodal analysis of social interaction facilitates and extends understanding of the teaching that is taking place.