ABSTRACT
In our recent history, educators have seen a significant shift in the kinds of texts students engage with on a daily basis in and out of school contexts (Thomas, 2007). As curricula have changed, such as the new Australian English Cur riculum (ACARA, 2010), to acknowledge these shifts due to societal and technological changes, teachers are now required to work with new kinds of texts in classroom contexts. Increasingly, these new kinds of texts are multi modal and include the presence of more than one semiotic mode: alphabetic print, visual, audio, tactile, gestural, and/or spatial representations (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009). Young people who are growing up immersed in multimodal texts need to be taught explicitly how such texts create meaning, so that they may become active and critical consumers and creators themselves, and be well prepared to engage successfully in society into their futures.
