Investigating Young Readers’ Use of Visual, Textual, and Design Resources in Contemporary Picturebooks

The texts students encounter are becoming increasingly complex and multimodal. There remains & a need to understand the semiotic resources students draw upon to make meaning with these multimodal texts. This study draws on social semiotics as a frame to explore the ways in which eight first graders with a wide range of literacy proficiency levels and first languages constructed meaning with selected multimodal picturebooks. Current assessment and text matching processes are documented and contrasted to the ways readers in this case study used the available semiotic resources, as measured by the Developmental Reading Assessment 2 (DRA2). The findings document the range and frequency of the resources first graders used when making meaning with the picturebook We Are in a Book! (Willems, 2010). We report findings related to the similarities and differences found among students with below and on/above literacy proficiency scores and among students who are bilingual and who speak only English. Finally, we report how two bilingual students (with below and above grade level literacy proficiency scores) used semiotic resources using an in-depth, qualitative cross-case analysis. The findings indicate students drew on a wide range of resources that are often missing from early literacy assessments.