'It's easy!': Scaffolding literacy for teaching multimodal texts

This article proposes a modification of Axford, Harders and Wise’s (2009) Scaffolding Literacy sequence to support the creation of multimodal persuasive texts by students in Year 5. As part of classroom implementation, the linguistic and visual meaning-making resources were discussed in order to explicate the salient features of a multimodal advertisement to assist students who were identified as having low literacy achievement. By initially deconstructing a text, students’ comprehension of the features was developed. Presented with this knowledge, students then designed a multimodal text using similar design features. The final texts demonstrated encouraging use of affective language and careful placement and framing of images by the students.