“They're Like Slash”: Multimodality and Embodied Agency in Students' Critical Engagements with Texts
Publication Date
1-1-2025
Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Reading Research Quarterly
Volume
60
Issue
1
DOI
10.1002/rrq.585
Abstract
Despite recent calls to more fully incorporate multimodal perspectives into literacies research, there is still limited scholarship examining how students critically engage in reading activities by drawing on embodied practices. Racially and linguistically minoritized students are particularly disadvantaged by dominant logocentric and developmentalist approaches, which privilege oral and written discourse and often position these students as less capable of performing complex literacy practices. Drawing from three independent ethnographic studies, our multimodal interactional analysis examines how students of a range of ages and raciolinguistic backgrounds use embodied actions and other semiotic resources to agentively navigate text, task, and ideological constraints in activities involving reading and analyzing texts. Our analysis demonstrates the crucial role of students' embodied practices in expanding upon and challenging the constraints of literacy activities, focusing particularly on how students leveraged epistemic stance-taking, embodied affective responses, and embodied forms of argumentation to negotiate and co-construct meaning. Through a focus on embodied agency, this paper presents and applies an interactional perspective on the embodied nature of literacy activities; shows how students' creative mobilizations of embodied and other semiotic resources contribute to their critical readings of texts; and offers pedagogical and methodological implications for ways educators and researchers can attend to the intricacies of students' embodied sense-making in literacy activities.
Funding Sponsor
International Research Foundation for English Language Education
Keywords
agency, discourse analysis, embodiment, literacies, multimodality, reading
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Department
Teacher Education
Recommended Citation
María José Aragón, Meghan Corella, and Nora W. Lang. "“They're Like Slash”: Multimodality and Embodied Agency in Students' Critical Engagements with Texts" Reading Research Quarterly (2025). https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.585
