ABSTRACT
We live in a visual world, but despite children and adolescents spending increasingly long periods outside of school engaging with visual images on different types of screens, in ways that may seem to undermine traditional forms of reading and writing, it is only recently that multimodal texts and the multimodal literacies that accompany them are being explored within educational contexts (Bearne, 2004). Reading literature can provide powerful, life-changing experiences (Rosenblatt, 1938), so when the power of images, whether graphic or mental, is combined aesthetically with words, the transaction (Rosenblatt, 1978) between the reader and the text can have a transforming influence as the imaginary impact is exponentially multiplied.
