MULTIMODALITY AND THE TEACHING OF CRITICAL READING

In contemporary classrooms, reading takes place across words, images, colour, layout, graphics, sound, and digital features. Yet critical reading is still often taught through print-centred and accuracy-driven practices. Multimodality and the Teaching of Critical Reading responds to this tension by rethinking critical reading as an interpretive, evaluative, and ideological practice rather than a skill that follows comprehension.

Drawing on multimodal literacy, learner agency, epistemic responsibility, and inquiry, this book examines how meaning is constructed across semiotic modes and how readers coordinate them. It considers the roles of text selection, task design, classroom interaction, teacher mediation, and scaffolding in creating conditions for critical engagement.

Particular attention is given to learner positioning. Students are approached not as passive recipients of authorised meanings, but as responsible meaning-makers whose interpretations may be partial, uncertain, divergent, and subject to revision. Such variability is understood as part of learning rather than a deficit to be eliminated. The book highlights productive struggle, dialogic interaction, and sustained interpretive openness as dimensions of critical reading.

Rather than presenting a fixed method, the book develops a principle-based pedagogical framework organised around textual design, task design, interaction and mediation, and learner positioning. It supports teachers in exercising professional judgment across classroom contexts.

Written for language teachers, teacher educators, graduate students, and researchers, this book offers a conceptual and pedagogical guide for cultivating critical reading through multimodality. It invites readers to reconsider reading as an evolving practice of meaning-making, inquiry, and epistemic engagement within the complex semiotic worlds of contemporary education.