This paper tests the hypothesis that access to digital technology alone guarantees development of crucial literacies and that "new media" are more critical in the developmental process than older electronic and print media (the "digital natives" thesis). Secondly, that the context of access and mediation provided by parents (as "digital immigrants") are no longer crucial in guiding the acquisition of foundational literacy skills, including ICT literacy. There is very little research on young children and new media. In the absence of large-scale empirical data some writers have assumed that new media will resemble television in its effects of on the development of a child's language abilities. The research presented in this paper uses an longitudinal data to disentangle the effects of access, context, time "exposed" to different media, including reading, on the child's language skills at different stage of their development, while controlling for family socioeconomic resources. Methods Methods Methods Methods This paper uses data from the first three waves of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) (Soloff, Lawrence & Johnstone, 2005). Briefly, LSAC is a national longitudinal study which follows two Australian cohorts born in 1999 and 2003 at two year intervals starting in 2004. The 2003 cohort (n=5107) and the 1999 cohort (n=4983) were aged 0-1 and 4-5 years respectively in 2004. Data were obtained using a combination of a face-to-face interview, self complete questionnaires, a child's time use diary; and, for the 1999 cohort

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English curricula are now requiring students in the middle years of schooling to explain how images influence the opinions communicated in multimodal paper and digital media texts. While such curricula address some aspects of visual semiosis, these do not include how images communicate ethical positions and judgements about propriety. This article explores the ways in which ethical and moral judgements are communicated in images in a selection of picture books and animated movies that challenge discourses that naturalize war and armed struggle as ways of addressing conflicts among communities and nations. A framework is proposed that distinguishes explicit visual inscription from a range of strategies for implicit invoking of judgement in images. The use of the distinctive affordances of picture books and animated movies in the different forms of invocation is discussed and implications for further research to inform multimodal discourse analysis and emerging multimodal literacy pedagogies are briefly noted.

This paper presents the qualitative results of a study of students' reading of multimodal texts in an interactive, online environment. The study forms part of a larger project which addressed image-language interaction as an important dimension of language pedagogy and assessment for students growing up in a multimedia digital age. Thirty-two Year 6 students representing a sample of high, medium and low performers on an Australian state-wide school literacy test were surveyed about their internet usage and interviewed using a structured protocol while working online through a selection of materials from an educational website. Findings from the earlier stages of the project indicated that different types of image-text relations vary in the degree of difficulty they pose for students' reading comprehension. This phase of the project extended the analysis of image-text relations to online, interactive texts. Student performance on online reading tasks and interview data are used to illustrate some of the complexities students encounter when reading online, and how this may vary with factors such as their day-to-day literacy experiences and levels of engagement. The results have implications for literacy pedagogy and assessing the reading of web-based texts.Keywords Online reading Á Image-text relations Á Reading hypertext Á Reading comprehension Á Literacy instruction Á Literacy assessment Contemporary texts require readers to comprehend information from an extensive range of images integrated with print material. The increasing use of images in instructional material, particularly in the case of multimedia and web-based texts,

This paper discusses the narrative role of images in three prize-winning children's books: 'The Rabbits' by

The Appraisal framework within Systemic Functional Linguistics as a robust tool in language teaching and research has attracted a great deal of interest in recent years. Since its establishment as the most complete account, the framework has been used in a variety of contexts, resulting in a number of refinements, tuning its applicability for specific research purposes such as studies of the evaluative language in research article abstracts, biology experiment reports, wine appreciation and student narrative writing. This article proposes additional refinements, particularly to the system of Attitude, informed by research into the deployment of evaluative resources in spoken discourse by postgraduate students in small group discussions in English and in Vietnamese. The refinements were required to account for the range of evaluative language used in discussions of topics including personal experiences of living and studying in Australia, academic experiences at Australian universities, and opinion about one's professional standing. These refinements contribute to the ongoing development of the Appraisal framework and provide a resource for enhancing the effectiveness of expressions of evaluative stance for speakers of English as a second or additional language.

Multimodal literacy is a term that originates in social semiotics, and refers to the study of language that combines two or more modes of meaning. The related term, multimodality, refers to the constitution of multiple modes in semiosis or meaning making. Modes are defined differently across schools of thought, and the classification of modes is somewhat contested. However, from a social semiotic approach, modes are the socially and culturally shaped resources or semiotic structure for making meaning. Specific examples of modes from a social semiotic perspective include speech, gesture, written language, music, mathematical notation, drawings, photographic images, or moving digital images. Language and literacy practices have always been multimodal, because communication requires attending to diverse kinds of meanings, whether of spoken or written words, visual images, gestures, posture, movement, sound, or silence. Yet, undeniably, the affordances of people-driven digital media and textual production have given rise to an exponential increase in the circulation of multimodal texts in networked digital environments. Multimodal text production has become a central part of everyday life for many people throughout the life course, and across cultures and societies. This has been enabled by the ease of producing and sharing digital images, music, video games, apps, and other digital media via the Internet and mobile technologies. The increasing significance of multimodal literacy for communication has led to a growing body of research and theory to address the differing potentials of modes and their intermodality for making meaning. The study of multimodal literacy learning in schools and society is an emergent field of research, which begins with the important recognition that reading and writing are rarely practiced as discrete skills, but are intimately connected to the use of multimodal texts, often in digital contexts of use. The implications of multimodal literacy for pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment in education is an expanding field of multimodal research. In addition, there is a growing attention to multimodal literacy practices that are practiced in informal social contexts, from early childhood to adolescence and adulthood, such as in homes, recreational sites, communities, and workplaces.

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