Middle-school students reading and creating multimodal texts: a case study

Abstract

This article focuses on the graphic novel produced by a 12-year-old student who participated in a multifaceted study that provided her with opportunities to engage with multimodal texts. An ecological perspective on teaching and learning framed the classroom-based research that explored how developing students' knowledge of literary and illustrative elements affects their understanding, interpretation and analysis of picturebooks and graphic novels, and the subsequent creation of their own print multimodal texts. During a 10-week period, 25 Grade 7 students participated in interdependent reading, writing and oral activities that offered them opportunities to learn about metafictive devices, some art elements and a few compositional principles of graphic novels. For the culminating activity of the study, the students created their own multimodal print texts. The in-depth analysis of one student's graphic novel reveals how her participation and engagement in a particular classroom community of practice affected her learning of the content and concepts under study.

Keywords:

• multimodal texts
• graphic novels
• literature
• reading
• writing