Multimedia literacy practices in the homes of young children are changing rapidly, but the use of them in the early years of education is moving slowly. This research was aimed to find out what teachers of 5-year-olds, in their first 6 months of compulsory schooling, think about the children's literacy practices at home, including the perceived use of digital media at home. We also wanted to find out what the teachers did in their classrooms that was similar or different to the students' experiences of literacy practices across several media. Parents of 76 children, and their teachers, from 10 classrooms in mid-high and mid-low socio-economic areas completed surveys. The parents' survey asked about the literacy-related experiences their children are involved in. The teachers' survey asked for their beliefs about the literacy-related experiences the children in their classrooms engaged in, on average, including the use of digital media. The teachers were also asked about the literacy practices in their classroom and their use of media. This paper describes the teachers' beliefs and the similarities and differences in practices between home and school, including literacy practices using digital technology.

After briefly reviewing how reading is conceptualised in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and the English National Curriculum, this article examines two unofficial reading activities in a class of 10–11-year-olds' to see how far these activities match up with the official definitions of reading, or whether they involve a different kind of interaction with text. Although the children's unofficial reading appears trivial, fleeting and fragmentary, analysis shows that they are applying, albeit in a rudimentary way, the comprehension skills of retrieval, inference, interpretation and evaluation promoted by the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and the National Curriculum. These skills, however, are driven by children's emotional, critical and creative responses to the texts. The children's reading is more imaginative and dialogic than is possible within official curriculum activities; they interweave emotional and moral response with argument and critique in one example and respond humorously to poetic rhyme, rhythm and tone in another. These spontaneous reading activities, where children are active, animated and engaged, provide evidence of important dimensions of literacy which are not adequately addressed in official surveys and curriculum assessment.

This article presents the outcomes of research, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in England and informed by work in the fields of new literacy research, gaming studies and the socio-cultural framing of education, for which the videogame L. A. Noire was studied within the orthodox framing of the English literature curriculum at A level (pre-university) and undergraduate (degree level) in the United Kingdom. A mixed methods approach was adopted. Firstly, students contributed to a gameplay blog requiring them to discuss their in-game experience through the ‘language game’ of English literature, culminating in answering a question constructed with the idioms of the subject's set text ‘final examination’. Secondly, students taught their teachers to play L. A. Noire, with free choice over the context for this collaboration. Thirdly, participants returned to traditional roles to work through a set of study materials, designed to reproduce the conventions of the ‘study guide’ for literature education. Fourthly, interviews were conducted after each phase. The interviews informed a redrafting of the study materials, which are now available online for teachers. In the act of inserting the study of L. A. Noire into the English literature curriculum as currently framed, this research raises epistemological questions about ‘subject identity’, and the implications for digital transformations of texts for ideas about cultural value in schooled literacy and also the politics of ‘expertise’ in pedagogic relations.

Little is known about how specific iPad applications affect parent–child story-sharing interactions. This study utilises a case-study approach to provide an insight into the patterns of interaction, which emerge when a mother and her 33-month-old daughter share a self-created, audio-visual ‘iPad story’. Multimodal analysis allowed us to gain insights into the complex interaction patterns orchestrated in this new, personalised story-sharing medium. We found that the app-mediated story-sharing context produced a harmonious and smooth interaction, achieving a coherence that is typical of ‘happy’ oral stories. We suggest that the observed interaction resembles that of experiencing a piece of art, and we highlight the need for a holistic approach to understanding the implications for research and practice of children's interactions during multimedia story sharing.

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 as a means of communication while instructing her students in reasons to predict when reading. Data sources for this case study consisted of field notes, artefacts and digital video. We analysed the teacher's use of gesture, speech and artefacts from a social semiotic multimodal perspective. Findings indicate that the teacher created meaning by interweaving multiple modes in the communicative contexts of strategy instruction using speech, deictic gestures, metaphoric gestures and artefacts. These findings are important to reading strategy instruction because much of the research and discussion of practice to date has centred on the instruction of reading strategies using teacher and student speech and not attending to the use of semiotic resources beyond speech.

This paper examines the use of student planners (agendas) with elementary school students. It asks how teachers, students and parents in two classrooms engage in the literacy practice of using student planners. A literacy object originally introduced to manage schoolwork in and out of school for students with learning difficulties, planners are now used widely in school districts across North America. In this cross-case analysis, planners are shown to be used for a number of functions beyond organising students’ schoolwork. The student planners were tools through which teachers, parents and publishers extended their spheres of influence – objects used to manage others when an individual was not physically present to do so and objects used to gain entry to the classrooms and homes for particular purposes.

The place of grammar within the teaching of writing has long been contested and successive research studies have indicated no correlation between grammar teaching and writing attainment. However, a recent study has shown a significant positive impact on writing outcomes when the grammar input is intrinsically linked to the demands of the writing being taught. The study adopted a mixed methods design with a large-scale randomised controlled trial accompanied by a qualitative dataset, which provided contextual information about how the intervention was implemented. In this paper, we will outline the pedagogical principles that underpinned the intervention, and illustrate both the theoretical grounding and practical classroom examples that exemplify the approach. We will argue that any future policy or professional development that draws on this research must take account of these pedagogical principles, rather than focusing too superficially on either the grammar or the teaching materials which exemplify them.

Thousands of UK school children spend considerable time during a lengthy period of their youth learning to read, or decode, a ‘religious classical’, the liturgical language connected to their faith. Drawing on recent theories of reading, identity and literacy practices, this paper briefly describes and seeks to share tentative thoughts about some common issues around the teaching and learning of religious classicals within minority ethnic faith settings. It presents a comparative textual analysis of a central teaching resource used in three Jewish, Muslim and Sikh complementary schools in the United Kingdom. It is concluded that, regardless of any relative effectiveness of method or resource, what may be more interesting for researchers is the symbolic value of learning to read the religious classical. This may be more important than the eventual outcome in terms of reading competence. Here, ‘successful reading’ is understood primarily as ‘successful decoding’. The tenacity of this literacy practice in the face of spoken community language attrition is testimony to the importance placed upon it both individually and collectively.

In recent years, literacy educators have increasingly recognised the importance of addressing a broader range of texts in the classroom. This article raises some critical concerns about a particular approach to this issue that has been widely promoted in recent years – the concept of ‘multimodality’. Multimodality theory offers a broadly semiotic approach to analysing a range of communicative forms. It has been widely taken up by literacy educators, initially at an academic level, and has begun to find its way into policy documents, teacher education and professional development and classroom practice. This article presents some criticisms, both of the theory itself and of the ways in which it has been taken up within the wider context of curriculum change. It argues that, in its popular usage, multimodality theory is being appropriated in a way that merely reinforces a long-standing distinction between print and ‘non-print’ texts. This contributes in particular to a continuing neglect of the specificity of moving image media – media that are central to the learning and everyday life experiences of young children. Drawing on recent classroom-based research, the article concludes by offering some brief indications of an alternative approach to these issues.

This qualitative case study explored the relationship between comprehension strategies and graphic novels in one Grade 4 classroom, utilising children as informants. The primary research questions related to children's applications of metacognitive reading comprehension strategies as well as the potential for graphic novels to support the students’ development as readers. Findings demonstrated that the children were able to apply two types of strategies to their reading of graphic novels: ‘keys’ that supported form-specific comprehension strategies and ‘master keys’ that supported more general comprehension strategies that could be applied to other types of texts. Student preferences for graphic novels aligned with their preferences for reading narrative novels and non-fiction, and did not align with preferences regarding comics or cartoons. Student preferences for reading graphic novels increased throughout the study. Fluent student responses to graphic novels through process drama were identified. Implications of the study involve the employment of graphic novels to support metacognitive strategies for reading and writing as well as to facilitate process drama.

In this paper, I give an account of the ways in which narratives and identities change over space and time. I give an account of a mobile and changing human subject, one who does not simply express or represent her- or himself through narrative, but is constructed and reconstructed through narrative. I draw on Paul Ricoeur's concepts of ‘narrative identity’, which refers to the role of narrative in the formation and expression of identities, and ‘refiguration’, which refers to the ways in which both narratives and identities change over time. I work with extracts from narrative interviews in order to demonstrate the ways in which this might help us understand how narratives and identities change across space and time and also consider what this might mean for pedagogy and the practice of literacy/ies.

How can literacies and literacy pedagogies better connect to the places and communities of children's lives? In this paper, I draw on the feminist poststructural concept of ‘storylines’ to analyse three stories of literacy learning to understand how different literacy practices and pedagogies function to produce different literate subjects. In order to think through a different conceptualisation of language and literacy in its relation to place, I explore the intersection of feminist poststructural and Australian Indigenous concepts of ‘storylines’. ‘Storyline’ within each knowledge framework is understood as the skeleton of a significant cultural narrative structure that informs patterns of thought and action. Australian Indigenous storylines, however, are ontologically and epistemologically connected to the land as walking trails that link the places where significant events in the creation stories of the ancestors took place. Each of these places is a site where stories are performed for the well-being of country and its people. In taking up this doubled meaning of storylines, I explore the potential of different social practices of literacy to connect children to their local places and communities.

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 language, the research featured in this paper is framed by a theory of artefactual literacies, narrative theory – particularly the genre of magical realism – and cultural studies, specifically notions of representation and cultural identity. The theoretical emphases on the artefactual, structural and representational aspects of multimodal narratives informs a multilayered, fine-grained approach to analysing students’ digital narrative poems using the tools of critical discourse analysis, literary analysis and a visual analytic framework developed for analysing student-produced digital photographs. This process is applied to a selected example, Gabriel's ‘My Name Is’ narrative, a story that plays with elements of magical real-ism to explore the simultaneity of his experience as an immigrant youth. The illustrative example speaks to the power of the ‘fantastical’ in literacy pedagogies that seek to take seriously students’ cultural identities and their visions for new realities.

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 school literacy practices that privilege individual achievement, devalue cultural ways of knowing, and operate on a paradigm of remediation. Within this educational backdrop, we report on a practitioner research study that invited students in a summer school programme for English Language Learners to share their experiences in multiple formats and media, including comics, and to draw on their cultural and linguistic heritages as sources of knowledge. We feature comics created by two students in the programme (an 8-year-old girl of Indian heritage and a 16-year-old boy from Vietnam) to understand the potential of visual texts to articulate micronarratives of immigration. We emphasise how students blend semiotic resources in order to represent the complexity of their experiences, convey cultural hybridity and resist singular narratives.

Sudanese families arriving in Australia bring with them a wealth of language and cultural resources that are currently not recognised by the Australian education system. This paper challenges such a position by investigating the narratives of the Sudanese Australians from a Deleuzian perspective. A Deleuzian perspective in education promotes the multiple literacies of the Sudanese Australians as a means to learn about and articulate important aspects of their changing circumstances. The families are not ‘othered’ or marginalised through this study, or compared to or against the normative cognitive functions that are produced by the current education system in Australia. Rather, an innovative way to look at the narratives of the Sudanese in Australia is explored by applying Deleuzian philosophy to education. Such a process uses the notion of the ‘virtual’ from Deleuze, which is a hybrid concept that engages with psychoanalytic and philosophical ideas from a fresh perspective. Such novel conceptual positioning is deemed necessary when investigating the narratives of the Sudanese Australians in order to think alongside the Sudanese in Australia. The final part of the paper takes the conceptual work from Deleuze and the investigation of the narratives, and makes pragmatic educational recommendations about literacy learning strategies for the Sudanese Australians.

Teachers of reading in secondary schools know how important it is for low-attaining readers to read whole narratives but time to do this in a crowded curriculum is limited and progress is more easily measured through reading smaller parts of texts. This paper reports on a longitudinal critical action research project in which three English teachers in two different urban secondary schools in the south of England read whole complex narratives with their classes of average and low-attaining Year 8 students (12- to 13-year-olds) with their practice newly theorised by hermeneutics and intertextuality. These theoretical approaches encouraged the teachers to situate the texts in relation to other related texts that supported students in making inferential links. Moreover, teacher pedagogic discourse became newly focused on text structure and coherence as the whole class read the text together and rapidly to the end with pleasure and understanding. The long-term impact of the action research suggests that such a theorised approach can influence teachers’ practice at a deep and sustainable level and in one school led to the introduction of a daily reading lesson where students read whole narratives they selected themselves, raising their reading ages and creating a reading culture.

The novel, it has generally been assumed, was from its very beginnings a literary form designed to be read by solitary, silent individuals. One consequence of this assumption is that the class novel, read amid all the noise and sociality of the classroom, tends to be treated as a preparation for more authentic, private reading, or even as a poor substitute for it. This essay argues that the history of novel reading is more complicated and more varied than has been assumed; it goes on to explore, through the story of a single lesson, the possibilities for meaning-making that are the product of particular pedagogic practices as well as of the irreducibly social process of reading the class novel.