This literature review focuses on the ever-changing textual landscape and the significantly new and complex skills required of primary and secondary school students as they read and view digital multimodal texts.

In this review, the term reading is more than the ‘simple view of reading’. That is, reading is much more than the constrained skills of decoding (Paris, 2005) and literal comprehension (Hoover & Gough, 1990). Whilst the skills inherent in the simple view of reading are necessary, they are not sufficient for full literacy. This review adopts Serafini’s (2012) assertion that reading also includes two interrelated understandings: (i) that texts cannot be separated from sociocultural contexts, and (ii) the multiple modes of meaning contained within a text must be understood together. On this latter point, Serafini (2012) introduces the term ‘reading-viewing’ to reinforce the re-conceptualization of the reader as a reader-viewer who attends to ‘visual images, structures and designs of multi-modal texts along with printed text’ (p. 152). These two points of discussion apply equally to traditional print texts and digital multimodal texts.

Borrowing from the research work of the New London Group (1996), the term multimodal text refers to those texts involving written words, visual meaning, audio meaning, gestural meaning and/or spatial meaning, as well as their intersections. These intersections, called intermodal coupling by Unsworth (2014), occur when texts contain multiple modes that must be understood together. Intermodal coupling is a feature of children’s picture books, for example, as written words, visual, gestural and spatial meaning need to be understood in the same instance (see Figure 1). The knowledges and skills for reading-viewing traditional print texts differ from those for reading-viewing digital texts. Traditional print texts are those where the text is presented in printed, hard copy form, such as a hard copy of a children’s picture book, a newspaper, a brochure, collector football cards, and so on. Figure 1 is an image of a page from a traditional print text. This traditional print text is considered a multimodal text because multiple elements and their intercoupling needs to be understood in the same instance. It must be recognised, however, that the reading-viewing of digital texts requires even more new and substantially complex knowledges and skills (Kress, 2003).