Weaving multimodal meaning in a graphic novel reading group

Despite the interest that literacy educators in the United States have expressed in graphic novels as a pedagogical tool, few empirical studies have asked how readers interact with their multimodal design to interpret them. To account for a gap in the literature, this case study asked how six high school students read and talked about four graphic novels in the context of a voluntary after-school reading group. In doing so, it sought to identify semiotic resources the students drew on as readers, and understand how they used them to construct literary meaning. Contrary to arguments that have traditionally characterized works written in the medium of comics as rendering readers passive, the findings indicate that the participants actively drew on an available visual and linguistic design to construct meaning and interpret the graphic novels they read.