As teachers seek to reflect children's diverse experience in the subject matter they present and in the questions they explore, they must also embrace children's multifaceted ways of knowing. Their major pedagogical challenge is to help children transform what they know into modes of representation that allow for a full range of human experience. In their lives outside of school, children 'naturally move between art, music, movement, mathematics, drama, and language as ways to think about the world [. . .]. It is only in schools that students are restricted to using one sign system at a time. ' (Short et al., 2000: 160). This study uses young children's drawings about reading and writing as an innovative way of investigating their perceptions and understandings of literacy across the broad contexts of their lives. The study challenges the politics of classroom practices that privilege language-dependent modes of representation over other modes.

W hile we learn languages to communicate, language is not the only or even (at times) the primary mode of communication. These two simple understandings, which underlie the expanding interest of language educators and researchers in multimodality, and underpin shifts in our thinking about discourse, texts, and language pedagogies, are being reimagined to acknowledge the increasing prominence of nonlinguistic modes. This interest is broad-based, extends across international borders and linguistic communities, and entails much more than the simple addition of visual literacy to the crowded lists of skill sets demanded of English language learners. It is driven by more than two decades of research in education, in linguistics and semiotics, and in fields as diverse as Internet and communication studies; it has led those within the field of language education to more explicitly rethink how language is used in contemporary learning contexts and the world beyond. Our own interest in these issues predates the currency of the term multimodality, and is informed by our years as teachers and researchers across a range of geographic, institutional and cultural contexts; by our work with young children, adolescents, and adults; and by our work with learners privileged and those disadvantaged by contemporary socioeconomic and political conditions. We are very pleased, therefore, to be editing this special issue on multimodality.

Drawing on theoretical perspectives related to play and identity, play as a literary and social text, and multimodality, I present an analysis of a play narrative centred on the theme of playing house. The narrative exemplifies the interconnections between literacy and identity in the social and cultural world of a young girl growing up in a multilingual, multi-literate household in an inner-city area of a western Canadian city. The example brings to the forefront how systematic examinations of children’s play narratives have the potential to contribute to current thought on literacy learning and self-construction in early childhood. Understanding the imagined identities children portray in play may be particularly revealing in terms of understanding how they position themselves in the world.

Fifty-eight Grade 1 children experiencing reading difficulties were divided into two matched remediation groups: PREP (PASS Reading Enhancement Program) (see Das & Kendrick, 1997) and Meaning-Based Reading intervention. Both groups received remediation twice a week for 20 min over a 9-week period. Participants’ reading level was assessed pre- and post-intervention using Word Identification (WI) and Word Attack (WA) tests. Repeated measures ANOVAs showed a significant main effect of Testing Time for both WI and WA. For WA, the Testing Time by Remediation Group interaction was also significant; the PREP group gained more than the meaning-based group in terms of decoding skills. Next, the performance of High-Gainers and No-Gainers in both groups was compared on several cognitive processing tasks. Results indicated that High-Gainers in the PREP group were characterized by a somewhat higher level of successive processing, phonological processing, and word recognition skills at the beginning of the program. In contrast, High-Gainers in the meaning-based program were characterized by a higher level of planning, phonological processing, and visual memory. Implications for education and future directions for research on remediation are also presented.

Uganda is a linguistically diverse nation where plurilingualism is common. Its language education policy dictates that, except in large urban areas, one local language be selected as the medium of instruction (MoI), to Primary 3, transitioning to English MoI, in Primary 4. Yet, as Ramanathan and Morgan () argue, “the practice of policy encourages us, as researchers and teachers, to read between and behind the lines (cf. Cooke, ), to interpret the ambiguities and gaps … that open up moments and spaces for transformative pedagogical interventions” (p. 448). The purpose of this study, conducted in Uganda with five Primary 4 teachers and their coordinator, was to explore such possibilities. It asks: How do subject‐area primary teachers in northern Uganda use local linguistic and multimodal cultural resources as plurilingual pedagogical tools to enhance students' learning in English MoI/TESOL classrooms? What are the challenges and constraints in employing locally available linguistic and multimodal cultural resources to become plurilingual pedagogical tools in English MoI/TESOL primary school classrooms? Three themes emerged: the teachers' exploratory plurilingual practices, students as plurilingual peer tutors, and integrated multimodal and plurilingual instruction. Challenges related to the larger educational cultural context and to local school and classroom conditions are also discussed.

The study focuses on a digital storytelling project conducted in a school district's transition program, in which adolescent refugee and immigrant English learners were invited to share aspects of their identities and social worlds through a range of modes. In this article, the authors look closely at one student's digital story through a multimodal analysis of three slides. The findings show how engaging with nonlinguistic modes provided enhanced opportunities for the student to explore and make visible complex and abstract facets of his life and identity, particularly as they relate to difficult past experiences.

Combating the spread of HIV/AIDS in Uganda has involved massive public education campaigns. One of the challenges of these campaigns has always involved the need to simultaneously respect and transcend cultural taboos around direct discussions about sexuality and sexual issues, particularly among youth. Research consistently shows that drawing, as a means of investigating what students know, has the potential to reveal students’ perceptions of given concepts and provides an alternative to predominantly language-based methods. Visual methods, however, have rarely been taken up in research on students’ sexual health and HIV/AIDS knowledge. This interpretive case study examines the use of cartoon drawing as a unique tool for understanding Ugandan secondary students’ conceptions of HIV/ AIDS, particularly concepts that are not directly discussed culturally.

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