Teaching reading through multimodal texts

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of research and theory around contemporary multimodal texts and reading. It explores some affordances of multimodal texts for developing English language learners' repertoires of reading. The chapter outlines some of the challenges for innovating practice in Asian English language teaching (ELT) contexts. It describes the four roles or areas of competence: code breaking (coding competence), meaning-making (semantic competence), text-user practices (pragmatic competence), and text-analyst practices (critical competence). The chapter provides some criteria for selecting texts, suggestions for addressing the four practices when teaching reading with multimodal texts, and assessment in multimodal reading. It discusses the ecology of English in Asian contexts, culture of learning in Asia, social and economic constraints, and ideology of text. In Asian contexts, such as China, Japan, and Thailand, it is a foreign language and studied as a school subject. Culture of learning captures a number of factors relevant to English language learning and teaching.