ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the idea of dialogic readers who are active, creative, collaborative respondents to both the narratives that they read and to each other as co-readers. It illustrates just how dialogic primary-aged children can be as they encounter texts together and how different multimodal reading contexts can promote their engagement. After a discussion of what dialogic reading in the 21st century might be, the chapter discusses whether it is feasible to regard texts as part of a dialogic process. It considers how engagement with the storyworlds of narrative texts can be conceptualised as a dialogic process. The chapter draws on research data of children making sense of visual narratives in different contexts. It presents a series of cases of children engaging in multimodal reading activities to explore how reading can be interpreted as a dialogic opportunity, as readers engage with different modes of text and collaborate with each other to make meaning.
