ABSTRACT
The nature of the texts children read and interact with has changed greatly in recent times. While a printed text on a page might still be the text that children encounter most at school, developments in technology mean that these texts are increasingly likely to be multimodal – many texts now draw on images, different fonts, diagrams and imaginative layouts to share meaning with their reader. Reading and writing using different multimedia, producing work for different audiences and using images and sound in addition to written or spoken language all requires a different range of skills and understanding: in effect, different literacies. Language comprehension is a wider field than reading comprehension, encompassing texts being read aloud and those watched on screen. While film texts can provide a useful and motivating medium for teaching comprehension and can help to build visual literacy, they are not a like-for-like replacement for reading written texts.
