In the last issue of Literacy, Carey Bazalgette and

David Buckingham argued that issues of multimodality

have been oversimplied, recruited to ofcial frame-
works, and sidelined Media Studies (Bazalgette and
Buckingham, 2013). In this issue, a number of articles
again engage with theories of multimodality to help us
explore different types of text.
As tablet computers become increasingly common in
homes and classrooms, we need ways of thinking
about childrens meaning-making on and around these
portable touch-sensitive screens. The rst two articles
in this issue make a valuable contribution to this
emerging area of research. Natalia Kucirkova, David
Messer, Kieron Sheehy and Rosie Flewitt use multi-
modal interaction analysis to investigate how a child
and her mother interacted with and around a multi-
media personalised story-sharing app on an iPad.
They note how gesture, movement, touch, talk and
facial expression signal the intimate and happy nature
of the interaction, linking this to the personalised content
along with the embodied physical connection between
adult, child and iPad as they came together in a shared
story space.
Alyson Simpson, Maureen Walsh and Jennifer Rowsell
focus on classroom interactions with an iPad in primary
and secondary schools in Canada, the United States and
Australia. The methods they used to record and analyse
these interactions will be of particular use to researchers
and practitioners seeking ways to capture the processes
through which children read on tablet computers. They
describe childrens multimodal, multidirectional reading
paths, highlighting how children work across and
between screens. Their ndings are provisional but offer
a valuable contribution to our growing understanding of
how the materiality of the iPad and haptics matter to the
process of reading texts on tablet computers.
Although these rst two articles explore ways of
analysing the processes involved in meaning-making
around new technologies and multimedia texts, Alison
Arrow and Brian Finch remind us that there is much to
be done in implementing literacy curricula and
pedagogies which adequately reect contemporary
communicative landscapes. Their survey of multi-
media literacy practices amongst children, parents
and teachers in New Zealand highlights a persistent
divide between planned school and home literacy
practices. In the past, this was often explained as a
mismatch between the literacy experiences of teachers
and their pupils. However, Arrow and Finch suggest
that the difculty is not the teachers lack of experience
in digital environments but that they may be insuf-
ciently aware of childrens home practices and do not
see the relevance of their personal digital experience
for literacy pedagogy and curriculum.
Richard Berger and Julian McDougall address this
disconnect between school curriculum and digital
media through their article based on a project giving
secondary students the opportunity to study the
videogame L. A. Noire as part of their English Litera-
ture A-level syllabus. Students blogged about the
game, taught it to their teachers and produced study
materials. Berger and McDougall highlight how the
work not only disrupted more traditional approaches
to what counts in the English curriculum but also
disrupted individuals usual positions as teachers and
learners as they read the game together. Berger and
McDougall describe different discourses that emerged
as teachers and students discussed how they negoti-
ated the reading of games as authorless literature.
The work helps us to revisit issues of legitimacy and
worth in the English curriculum and perhaps invites
us, as literacy scholars, to engage with games. Taking
this work alongside that of Arrow and Finch, perhaps
we should see video games as much a part of the
literacy landscape as written stories and poetry. Video
games are an important part of many students home
literacy repertoires, and we need to acknowledge and
develop their skills and knowledge, as well as our own.
The last two articles focus on interactions with texts
and contribute in very different ways to debates about
the teaching of reading comprehension. Dening
comprehension as the dialogic transaction of making
meaning from text, Fiona Maine provides us with
detailed analyses of childrens interactions with a
picture book and an image as they readtogether in pairs.
She highlights how, as children talked around texts
together, they played with meanings and connected
what they saw to their own experience. In the last
issue, Janet Maybin (Maybin, 2013) argued that emo-
tional commitment drives childrens engagement with
texts, and we see this in Maines article too, as the
childrens responses seemed to be deepened as they
engaged emotionally with the texts and with each other.
Our nal article, from Lynn Shanahan and Lisa Roof,
derives from a study of reading strategy instruction.
Descriptions of effective teaching are commonly
described in terms of teacher/pupil talk, and a series
of seminal studies have encouraged teachers and
teacher educators to see pupil/teacher talk as central to
learning. Although Shanahan and Roofs conclusions
are tentative, they raise important points about the need
to examine gesture in teacher/pupil interaction and
prompt us to reect on teachers use of gesture and its re-
lationship to different teaching styles. Their article can,
Editorial
Copyright 2013 UKLA. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Literacy Volume 47 Number 3 November 2013 113
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perhaps usefully, be read in conjunction with Roberta
Taylors work on multimodal analysis of childrens inter-
actions, published previously in Literacy (Taylor, 2012).
Together, these articles demonstrate a diversity of
ways in which different modes movement, images,
gesture, posture, proxemics, haptics and words are
imbricated in our dialogues with texts and highlight
the signicance of artefacts, bodies and relationships
to meaning-making. Such perspectives help us arrive
at complex understandings of childrens meaning-
making, which challenge narrow frameworks for
structuring the teaching and assessment of literacy.
Cathy Burnett
Julia Davies
References
BAZALGETTE, C. and BUCKINGHAM, D. (2013) Literacy, media
and multimodality: a critical response. Literacy, 47.2, pp.
95102.
MAYBIN, J. (2013) What counts as reading? PIRLS, EastEnders and
The Man on the Flying Trapeze. Literacy, 47.2, pp. 5966.
TAYLOR, R. (2012) Messing about with metaphor: multimodal
aspects to childrens creative meaning making. Literacy, 46.3, pp.
156166.
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Copyright 2013 UKLA