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With increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in today’s classrooms, a growing body of research continues to explore the varied ways in which digital tools and multiple modalities can tap into emergent bilingual students’ academic and linguistic strengths. To understand the empirical landscape of this growing research, the authors systematically reviewed the literature on emergent bilinguals and digital multimodal composition in secondary classrooms. Through an inductive approach, the authors analyzed 70 studies to understand key findings and characteristics of the extant research. Five main themes of findings emerged across the research. First, a majority of studies illustrated how digital multimodal composing supports emergent bilingual students’ identity expression. With expanded opportunities to share ideas through multiple modes, students used their projects to bridge transnational identities, (re)present themselves, and communicate in empowering ways. Second, nearly half of the studies emphasized how the integration of digital multimodal projects can reshape classrooms by challenging language ideologies, transforming the classroom as a locus for social justice, and expanding temporal and spatial boundaries as students compose for multiple audiences. Third, many studies demonstrated how emergent bilinguals develop as designers and leverage the unique semiotic resources of multiple modes when composing. Fourth, approximately a third of the studies showed how multimodal composition offers emergent bilinguals opportunities to expand their existing linguistic repertoires. Finally, a quarter of the studies illustrated the potential of multiple modes to mediate learning during composing processes. The authors discuss the implications of these themes and critical new directions for future research on digital multimodal composing with emergent bilingual students.

Digital gameplay and digital multimodal composition (DMC) are promising multimodal literacy practices. Nevertheless, research on their incorporation in literacy classrooms to foster students' multimodal literacy skills is lacking. This qualitative case study explored how two groups of Chinese adolescents used multimodal literacy in digital game-based multimodal composition and assumed their role as critical and creative prosumers. Through a 16-session project, the participants used tablets to collaboratively produce short game videos based on design resources obtained during their digital gameplay. The students demonstrated multimodal literacy through understanding, interpreting and applying multimodal semiotic modes for representational, interpersonal, and compositional meaning-making. Furthermore, they played a multifaceted role as prosumers, including critical gamers, reflective video editors, creative designers, and knowledgeable contributors to the gaming community. This study suggested that incorporating digital games for DMC practice is a valuable opportunity for multimodal literacy learning, cultivating students' criticality and creativity for active participation in the digital era.

In this article, I use narrative portraiture as a methodology to inquire into the ways that two Asian American (AsAm) girls used their time in an afterschool writing collaborative for girls of Color to explore and express their identities and political commitments through multiple literacies. Building on theoretical foundations of AsianCrit, women of Color, and AsAm feminisms, and sociocultural understandings of literacies, I argue against the flattening of AsAm girlhood, rooted in the harmful intersection of sexism and stereotypes such as the model minority and forever foreigner tropes. Three learnings emerged from this study: (1) AsAm girls’ relational literacies are used to explore and express AsAm girlhood, (2) AsAm girls use multimodal literacies to inquire into and story their identities in ways that resist dominant definitions of AsAm girlhood, and (3) AsAm girls are holders of emerging political identities that can be supported through supportive literacy curriculum. The work of the girls featured in this article has important implications for the ways the field understands AsAm girlhood and AsAm girl literacies. I put forth a necessary call for more AsAm feminist scholars to work alongside AsAm girls to create richer understandings of their needs and desires and how we might support them through literacy pedagogies.

In response to widespread interest in 21st-century learning across the educational landscape, the authors explored the extent to which the concept possesses clear definition and coherent meaning within both research discourse and K–12 classroom practice in the United States, particularly with regard to conceptualizations and enactments of literacy. This research review offers descriptive data about the subject areas and grade levels in which 21st-century learning efforts are concentrated, analyzes the literacy frameworks employed to guide pedagogy, and describes instructional practices most frequently associated with the concept. Further, this research review explores the role of digital tools in the enactment of 21st-century learning, including how often teachers are leveraging the collaborative and interactive affordances of those tools. By leveraging a critical analytic framework, findings indicate a dearth of classroom-based research emphasizing democratic engagement and equity within 21st-century learning, as well as a hesitancy to use digital literacies to connect with wider publics. Analysis suggests a weakly defined understanding of what literacy learning in the 21st century means in classrooms today, which speaks to the need for a stronger focus on social futures.

This conceptual review article explores the intersection of multimodal writing and multilingualism in a contemporary educational context, with a focus on both secondary and post-secondary classrooms. As digital tools, media platforms, and global communication in interconnected spaces reshape literacy practices, students increasingly communicate and express themselves through a range of modes—visual, audio, textual, and gestural—often in more than one language. This article argues for reimagining and reconceptualizing writing to be a multifaceted literacy practice that integrates multimodal digital tools and that invites multilingual literacy opportunities. Drawing on classroom examples and current research on multimodal writing and translanguaging practices in multilingual spaces, the article explores how educators can support students in developing critical literacy skills through multimodal projects that honor linguistic diversity, cultural identity, and multiple means of expression. The article offers practical strategies for scaffolding multimodal writing in multilingual space, creating inclusive literacy environments where multilingualism and multimodality are seen as a resource, not a barrier.

Purpose Artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly important and influential in reading and writing. The influx of social media digital spaces, like TikTok, has also shifted the ways multimodal composition takes place alongside AI. This study aims to argue that within spaces like TikTok, human composers must attend to the ways they write for, with and against the AI-powered algorithm. Design/methodology/approach Data collection was drawn from a larger study on #BookTok (the TikTok subcommunity for readers) that included semi-structured interviews including watching and reflecting on a TikTok they created. The authors grounded this study in critical posthumanist literacies to analyze and open code five #BookTok content creators’ interview transcripts. Using axial coding, authors collaboratively determined three overarching and entangled themes: writing for, with and against. Findings Findings highlight the nuanced ways #BookTokers consider the AI algorithm in their compositional choices, namely, in the ways how they want to disseminate their videos to a larger audience or more niche-focused community. Throughout the interviews, participants revealed how the AI algorithm was situated differently as both audience member, co-author and censor. Originality/value This study is grounded in critical posthumanist literacies and explores composition as a joint accomplishment between humans and machines. The authors argued that it is necessary to expand our human-centered notions of what it means to write for an audience, to co-author and to resist censorship or gatekeeping.

The tremendous interest in multimodality within the field of literacy education has challenged the verbocentric literacy landscape of schools. Research on multimodality in classroom spaces has suggested that combining and juxtaposing multiple sign systems is a generative act of transforming meanings. Yet, attention to entanglements of pedagogy and power has been rare in the research on students’ engagement with multimodality. In this article, we complicate the research on the generative potential of children’s multimodal sign-making in school by tracing the ways this process is saturated with power. Using a theoretical mash-up, performative semiotics, we read a classroom event, situated in a computer lab, in which two kindergartners regarded as successful literacy learners designed digital texts about a bunny that some children reported seeing on a field trip. The multiple meanings of bunny that the children negotiated are theorized as chains of contested sign-making that are performative. In tracing both sign-making and performativity, the analysis makes visible the politics of schooled literacy and the way children’s performances appear fixed yet are destabilized in their interactions, thus complicating the assumption that multimodality is a generative process that can transform schooled literacy. This analytic mash-up also focuses attention on the instability of classroom interactions and shows how this provides openings for performing literacy differently even as they remain bound to normalized and naturalized ways of being literate in school. Thus, we argue that claims about multimodality require attention to the way both fixity and instability produces school literacy performances.

In the era of generative artificial intelligence, writing has evolved into a programmable practice capable of generating sustainable narratives and preserving cultural heritage through poetic prompts. This study proposes “Writing Is Coding ” as a paradigm for sustainability education, exploring how students engage with AI-mediated multimodal creation to address environmental challenges. Using grounded theory methodology with 57 twelfth-grade students from technology-integrated high schools, we analyzed their experiences creating environmental stories and digital cultural artifacts using MidJourney, Kling, and Sora. Data collection involved classroom observations, semi-structured interviews, and reflective journals, analyzed through systematic coding procedures (κ = 0.82). Five central themes emerged: writing as algorithmic design for sustainability (89.5%), emotional scaffolding for environmental awareness (78.9%), aesthetics of imperfection in cultural preservation (71.9%), collaborative dynamics in sustainable creativity (84.2%), and pedagogical value of prompt literacy (91.2%). Findings indicate that AI deepens environmental consciousness and reframes writing as a computational process for addressing global issues. This research contributes a theoretical framework integrating expressive writing with algorithmic thinking in AI-assisted sustainability education, aligned with SDGs 4, 11, and 13.

This essay reimagines the way that listening is taught in the multimodal composition classroom. In contrast to listening to sonic content for meaning, the listening pedagogy I introduce is based on my concept of multimodal listening—a practice that involves attending to the sensory, material, and contextual aspects that comprise and shape a sonic event. I argue that cultivating multimodal listening practices will enable students to become more savvy consumers and producers of sound in the composition classroom and in their everyday lives.

The author contributes new insights into everyday literacies in participatory cultures using a multimodal analysis of three LGBTQ+ reaction videos on YouTube. LGBTQ+ reaction videos respond, often comedically, to oppressive media forms and technologies. In the analysis, the author considers how reaction video makers draw on seven meaning-making modes and multimodal techniques in digital composition to enact practices of critical media literacy, namely, to identify, interrogate, and disrupt dominant ideologies that undergird media forms and technologies. Through analytic video logging and multimodal analysis of video episodes, the author also examines the role of humor in enactments of these practices. The article forwards the conceptual framework of humor as political possibility made manifest in the range of ways that video makers construct slips of humor, compose multimodal parodies, and create satires that critique dominant ideologies and imagine new ways of being in the world. Examining literate activities in participatory cultures with a focus on LGBTQ+ identities has purchase to explicate possibilities to name, challenge, and transform dominant ideologies toward more just futures.