Primary Students Transgress Story World Boundaries in Their Multimodal Compositions

Abstract

ABSTRACTDuring a multifaceted classroom-based study, 22 7- and 8-year-old children had opportunities to develop their understanding of visual art and design elements and diverse narrative structures in picturebooks. The culminating activity of the case study research involved application and transformation of knowledge of the instructional foci as the students composed their own multimodal print texts. The data reported in this article feature an analysis of the narrative structures in the students’ multimodal compositions, focusing specifically on the forms of metalepsis, the purposeful disturbing or breaking of narrative boundaries, evident in their writing and artwork. Discussions of the relevant theoretical frameworks and literature are followed by descriptions of the research context and methods, and procedures employed for data analysis. Content analysis revealed how the students’ use of nine types of metalepsis in their verbal and/or visual texts resulted in the creation of complex narrative structures. Quantitative findings are followed by descriptive analyses of three students’ multimodal compositions. In addition to discussing how the students’ multimodal text making was socially embedded, the article concludes with a discussion of the importance of teachers and students developing their understanding of diverse narrative structures in contemporary multimodal texts.