Students’ multimodal reading of culturally conscious stories: a multiple case study analysis

The widespread availability of diverse children’s literature in digital text and audiobook formats offers opportunities to use reading while listening for long-form reading of multicultural stories. When paired with readers’ tracking of text, professional audio narration brings culturally authentic voices into reading transactions. How this type of reading multimodality shapes readers’ interpretations of stories, and whether it could support reading motivation, remain under-explored, particularly among preadolescents reading in their primary language. In this multiple case study, six students in grade five read digital text while listening to professional audio narration as they engaged with culturally conscious children’s literature for independent reading. This novel reading context enabled exploration of how participants described and responded to multimodal reading of culturally conscious stories; how they interpreted multimodal culturally conscious stories; and how they demonstrated motivation in multimodal reading of culturally conscious stories. Multimodality, reader-response, and expectancy-value theories informed data collection and analysis. Data sources included pre- and post-study administration of a reading motivation survey, pre- and post-study student interviews, think-aloud sessions, reader-response journal entries, post-study parent interviews, and post-study English language arts teacher interviews. Survey scores, used for descriptive purposes only, were combined with open coding of the qualitative data to inform holistic interpretations of each student case and to explore themes across cases. Qualitative findings included the observation that students’ perceived reading needs shaped how they appropriated the modalities and thus also shaped the literary products they experienced in this novel reading context. Importantly, while students perceived the audio narration to reduce reading labor, their conceptualizations of effective audio performances also required convincing portrayals of various aspects of characterization. Furthermore, students frequently made meaning of the multimodal stories through inquiry, but beyond-the-text connections, evaluative thinking, and emotional connections to story content signaled story interpretation and culturally situated readings, which in turn varied in the directness of their manifestation as well as how, and to what extent, they shaped students’ construction of personal meaning from text and deeper understanding of story content. Finally, students manifested the motivation constructs variously, with the strongest indicators of expectancy for reading success expressed by students who reported consistently tracking text, and the strongest indicators of reading value expressed by students who reported reading while listening more consistently. Implications of these qualitative findings for classroom practice and future research are discussed.