ABSTRACT
Although discussing children’s literature in terms of print media texts alone “ignores the multimedia expertise of our children” (Mackey, 1994, p. 17), it cannot be simply assumed that experience of multiply versioned stories equips young readers to understand how the interpretive possibilities of story are shaped by the affordances of the different media through which the stories are being experienced. Despite a very significant proportion of young people being highly adept at using digital media for creative expres sion, research, and social life, they are not necessarily correspondingly adept at understanding how multimedia affordances influence the interpretive pos sibilities of the texts they are negotiating (Jenkins, 2006; Kellner & Share, 2007; LuceKapler, 2007). Appreciating that no text is ‘innocent’ and under standing how to interrogate or analyze texts to determine how they have been structured to convey a particular evaluative stance, whether explicitly or implicitly, has long been held as a crucial aspect of critical literacy (Gee, 2003; Hood, 2010; Lemke, 2006; Luke, 2000). Such critical interpretive analysis of texts may be facilitated by explicit knowledge of how meanings are made through the structuring of the semiotic resources of language and image.
