How multimodality matters in children’s literature scholarship

To consider whether multimodality matters, literacy researchers and educators must first explore the theoretical foundations of social semiotics and multimodality, how these theories have evolved to address current social, cultural, and material contexts, and the implications of these theories on literacy pedagogy. In addition to conceptualizing what multimodality is, it is important to explore what multimodality does for picturebook scholars, literacy researchers, and educators. Literacy educators would benefit from a better understanding of how picturebooks work from social semiotic and multimodal perspectives, how children make sense of complex multimodal texts, and the various roles picturebooks play in the social, historical, and cultural contexts in which they are embedded.