The promise of "21st century learning" is that digital technologies will transform traditional learning and mobilize skills deemed necessary in an emerging digital culture. In two case studies of video making, one in a Grade 4 classroom, and one in an adult literacy setting, the authors develop the concept of "production…

Access to digital technology in the classroom enables the composition and organization of ideas on screen with a variety of semiotic systems of different modes and media. This study explores patterns of communication and preference of design in digital meaning-making of twelve 7-8 years old students. Meanings were shaped in complex uses and…

This paper explores the idea that young children's emergent literacy practices can be tools for mediating peer interaction, and that, therefore, literacy, even in its earliest stages, can support oral language development, particularly for emergent bilinguals. The paper draws on data collected during a year-long ethnographic study of 11 Nepali-…

Julie Coiro is an assistant professor in the Reading Department at the University of Rhode Island. Her research focuses on adolescents' online reading comprehension development. She has served as co-editor of the "Handbook of Research in New Literacies" (Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2008), among many publications. In this interview, Coiro…

In this article, the author draws on a semester long freshmen learning community in which multimodal texts were used as primary texts along with traditional texts to support students' academic literacy skills. Analysis shows that a multimodal text created by students contain elements of academic literacies and qualities of multimodal texts. An…

This article reports the results of a school-based curriculum development project that aimed to support language teachers working with culturally and linguistically diverse student populations in Norway to develop teaching strategies that foster intercultural citizenship and multilingual competence. Three university researchers collaborated with…

In a first-year, university-level communication course that examined issues of race, ethnicity, postcolonialism, diaspora, and coming-of-age using different points of view and modes of communication, students created graphic novel-style auto-ethnographies to reflect on their experiences with diaspora and identity creation. The assignment was an…

Twenty-first-century literacy is not confined to communication based on reading and writing only traditional printed texts. New kinds of literacies extend to multimedia projects and multimodal texts, which include visual, audio, and technological elements to create meanings. The purpose of this study is to explore how Korean secondary English…

This study explores relationships among reading literature, creative writing, and language development in a university-level advanced French grammar course through the theoretical lens of the multiliteracies framework. The goal is to investigate reading-writing connections and whether these literacy practices facilitate students' understanding and…

This article focuses on teaching critical literacy in the context of Singapore. It begins with a conceptualization of critical literacy as a stance oriented to questioning and challenging the often taken-for-granted meanings and assumptions found in "everyday" texts. It then discusses how this stance can be cultivated in students through…

Outcomes-based curricula have become the global norm in the last decennia. School authorities have more or less left behind their old habits of either forcing upon teachers a set of content to teach and methods to use, or leaving teachers alone because they trust their professional knowledge to choose what is best for their learners. The current…

Literacy specialists and coaches are called upon for literacy leadership in schools and often wrestle with the tensions of implementing top-down reforms and making room for teacher- and student-led practices, such as critical literacy. Critical literacy education holds the promise of engaging learners to use literacy practices in ways that matter…

This study draws upon a survey of writing conceptions and cultural dispositions data, as well as multimodal compositions allowing bilingual teacher candidates to recursively explore and deepen the relationships between language, identity, and culture in learning. We found that teacher candidates did rethink the relationships through the multimodal…

In this study, I examined integrating place-based education pedagogy and multimodal literacies into a graduate level children's literature class. The findings suggest including place-based education pedagogy allows middle level graduate students to connect to geographically-based children's literature. The findings also propose that incorporating…

Sociocultural perspectives on literacy include various theories focused on the myriad ways in which people use literacy in context, which include a strong emphasis on power relations. Yet, these theories also have important differences, and many in the field of literacy do not clearly differentiate among them. I provide a critical overview of…