MULTIMODAL INSTRUCTION AS A MEANS TO SCAFFOLD LITERARY INTERPRETATION IN A SECONDAY ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS CLASSROOM

This descriptive study investigates what happens when an English Language Arts teacher implements multimodal instruction in his senior-level World Literature course. The study is grounded in theories of transmediation and New Literacy Studies and examines the following research questions: 1.) What does multimodal instruction enable students to do and how does it shape and support students' engagement and interpretation with literary texts? 2.) What are the cognitive affordances of students' participation in multimodal tasks? The research site was a private all male high school a few miles outside a medium-sized city in the Northeast. One twelfth-grade World Literature classroom was observed for a nine-week period as students read two literary texts and composed three multimodal representations in response to each text. Data included field notes, videotaped classroom sessions, student-produced multimodal representations, student reaction forms, students' rationales for representation and debriefing sessions with the teacher. Findings of the study reveal there are multiple cognitive and learning strategies that take effect as a result of multimodal instruction and that this type of instruction can be a valuable method for teaching literary interpretation