One Fourth-Grader’s Orchestration of Modes Through Comic Composition

Abstract

Language-oriented literacy standards offer mostly linguistic accounts of text complexity. In response, the present article demonstrates that multimodal and visual narratives offer additional ways to understand and discuss text complexity. This descriptive analysis of one fourth-grader’s comic provides an account of the multimodal patterns and orchestration noted across the pages of the comic. Data sources included the published comic, as well as a multimodal artifact elicitation interview conducted with Sabrina, a fourth-grade student. The authors show how Sabrina constructed a complex multimodal text by drawing not only from her knowledge of image and written language but also from her experiences with spoken language, touch, facial expressions, and gesture. These findings suggest that it would be beneficial for teachers and researchers to continue to create curricular space for multimodal composing opportunities and that stakeholders in language arts and communication education might deepen collaborations to develop instructional frameworks that support students as they compose using modes beyond language across the grade levels.

Writing Storybooks as Storytelling: A Case Study of Two Families with Refugee Backgrounds

“…First, the findings suggest the value of incorporating multimodal storytelling into class activities to help classroom teachers understand the stories of their students with refugee backgrounds in multiple ways, such as using various semiotic resources and encouraging children to tell their stories using these resources. Similar to the scholarship on students' multimodal literacy (Mills et al, 2020;Reid & Moses, 2022;Vasudevan et al, 2010), this article shows that multiple semiotic resources afford more meaningful and interesting ways for children to enact their agency to engage in writing and represent their stories.…”

“…This statement draws our attention to how people who are sign-makers choose various modes to represent meanings or communicate based on their interests and agency. Scholars have explored how students act as designers and exercise their agency when composing multimodal texts and engaging in other multimodal literacy practices (Cimasko & Shin, 2017; Gilje, 2010; Reid & Moses, 2022; Vasudevan et al, 2010).…”

“…Researchers have drawn upon theoretical perspectives that employ the social semiotics multimodal approach to explore students’ multimodal literacy in the educational field (Mills et al, 2020; Reid & Moses, 2022; Vasudevan et al, 2010). For example, Mills et al (2020) examine elementary school-aged students’ communication of attitude, finding that the students developed and used language and visual resources (e.g., speech, images, and gestures) to “inscribe and invoke emotional, ethnical, and aesthetic meanings in self-authored comic design” (p. 160).…”

“…For example, Mills et al (2020) examine elementary school-aged students’ communication of attitude, finding that the students developed and used language and visual resources (e.g., speech, images, and gestures) to “inscribe and invoke emotional, ethnical, and aesthetic meanings in self-authored comic design” (p. 160). Reid and Moses (2022) explore a fourth-grader’s making of multimodal comics and find that the student’s image-text knowledge and her experience related to communicative modes (e.g., gestures, spoken language) all influenced the student’s multimodal comics composition. Similarly, Vasudevan et al (2010) conducted a storytelling study on fifth-graders’ identity construction when composing their multimodal texts and found that the introduction of multimodality provided more opportunities for the students to tell their stories “across community, home, and school contexts” (p. 448).…”