Multiliteracies and Multimodal Text Analysis in Classroom Work with Children's Literature

Multimodality has long been the reality of school curriculum materials, but the latter part of the 20th century has seen a significant shift to the prominence of images (Goodman & Graddol, 1996; Kress, 1995, 1997, 2000). The proliferation of computer-based resources has drawn attention to the increasing role of multimodal and intermodal features of textual materials in digital forms (Baldry, 2000; Bolter, 1998; Jewitt, 2002; Lemke, 2002) and in hard copy forms (Henderson, 1999; Royce, 1998; Russell, 2000). Nevertheless, many teachers and students see multimodality as a naturalized aspect of conventional hard copy and computer-based texts, and their visual, verbal, acoustic, and digital 'constructedness' is rarely addressed in classroom work.