Analysing students' reading of online, multimodal texts

This paper explores some of the methodological issues involved in an ongoing study of students' reading of online, multimodal texts. The purpose of the study is to investigate how students utilise information from different modes of meaning (visual, audio, written and spoken language) while working through a series of online reading tasks from selected educational websites, and how they integrate these meanings effectively to make sense of the material. The reading tasks addressed a range of skills such as: locating, identifying and interpreting information from language and images, making inferences from the information, connecting, linking or sequencing information, describing processes, and combinations of these skills. The tasks extended across different modes of meaning (e.g. spoken and written language, moving and still images), and across different types of screen displays (e.g. interactive webpages and pop-ups). A semi-structured instrument was used to elicit students' verbalisations of their responses to the online tasks - what the websites were about, their reactions or feelings while engaged in each activity, their retelling of what they needed to do to complete each task; their comprehension of the topical content of the activities as indicated by their answers to a set of questions, their strategies for answering the questions, and their awareness of the relationships among different modes of meaning. Some of the methodological issues for consideration in this paper include: • Techniques for recording online reading activity • Transcription of interactive multimodal data • Semiotic analysis of multimodal data