ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the hypertextual, interactive, and visual elements of contemporary children’s texts, and proposes a pedagogy of multiliteracies that draws on social semiotics and sociocultural theories. As an organizational framework, the discussion employs a widely accepted heuristic for reading comprehension, which defines reading as the interaction among four elements: the reader, the text, the activity, and the sociocultural context. This model of reading comprehension was developed with a traditional print-based notion of “text” in mind, and thus contains particular expectations about what the reader is to “do” with the text (e.g., decode the graphophonic cueing system). However, basic print literacy alone, while remaining ever-important, is no longer enough to meet the demands of new forms of texts and new literacies. Thus, this chapter updates the terrain of early literacy pedagogy to include highly interactive visualtexts, and outlines roles for the reader/writer when producing and consuming these texts, as well as roles for the teacher/facilitator for designing interactivevisual activities. The chapter closes with a discussion of the instructional dynamics necessary for a pedagogy of multiliteracies.
