Educational research has shown the importance of adopting a multimodal approach to pedagogy by combining, integrating, and organizing diverse semiotic resources for learning. As aesthetic content and forms are significant aspects of multimodality, arts integration is crucial to achieve multimodal knowledge practices. In this paper, we develop a…

What patterns of multimodal rhetoric characterizes the most successful texts meant for learning--inside or outside school? This article argues that the balance between cohesion and tension in the interplay between modes is an issue at the core of this challenging question. Texts meant for learning need both cohesion and tension in order to be both…

The recently introduced "Australian Curriculum: English" (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), 2012) requires students to "read" multimodal text and describe the effects of structure and organisation. We begin this article by tracing the variable understandings of what reading multimodal text might…

It is recognised that verbal texts do not result only from words. They may involve the mental manipulation of other modes of representation such as images and sounds. If this is the case, we must consider what is not operating with writers who find it extraordinarily difficult to produce verbal texts. Are they failing to mentally code or…