READING MULTIMODALLY: Comprehension and Attitudes in Extensive Reading

Reading is the gateway through which students of English meet the knowledge of their discipline, and yet it is often the skill they find most tiring to practise. This monograph grew out of a research project that asked a practical question: what happens when extensive reading, long recognised as a way of building fluency, vocabulary and a love of reading, is combined with a multimodal approach that brings words, images, sound and other modes of meaning together in a single reading experience? The study was carried out at a private university, and its title names its two concerns: students’ comprehension and their attitudes towards reading.
The book is written for lecturers, teacher educators, curriculum developers and postgraduate researchers who work with English as a foreign language. It assumes no specialist background, but it tries to give readers what they need to think about the approach for themselves: the concepts that underpin it, the ways in which attitudes can be described and measured, and examples of how students actually responded when they read a story in this way.