‘You’re meant to read the writing?’: Young pupils negotiating meaning from digitally mediated multimodal texts

This essay addresses the socio-technological changes in the early literacy classroom and the significance of digital mediation and multimodal text design for pupils’ understanding of content, as well as the role the teacher’s instructional scaffolding may have. In particular, the study described here investigates how 8-year-old pupils make meaning from multimodal digital texts, and what motivates their semiotic focus. What are their modal preferences and how does the text design influence their reading? The study confirms the complexity of making meaning from digitally mediated multimodal texts, which requires an understanding of the semiotic and digital potential of texts. The analysis demonstrates that in the hybridity of the multimodal digital text, the young pupils predominantly interact with the visual meanings. Their literacy strategies are influenced by their prior experience as novice readers of the written word, as well as the semiotic meanings of the text. The teacher’s redirection of the pupils’ semiotic attention played a significant role for the processing of meaning. For classroom practice, this implies the significance of developing multimodal and digital pedagogies to support understanding of both the production and the reception of the multimodal design of digital texts.