Editorial.

Rennie, Jennifer ; Patterson, Annette ; Doecke, Brenton 等

Welcome to the October edition of AJLL. Over the past couple of decades the literate demands on contemporary youth have become increasingly more complex due in part to the advent of new technologies. Meaning is not just conveyed through linguistic modes but also incorporates other modes including the visual, audio, spatial and gestural. Texts today often comprise a combination of many of these different modes within the same text. Technology has also led to the development of quite different text types including such things as wikis, web pages and blogs. In addition to these new text types our youth continue to engage with the more traditional print-based texts. They continue to find enjoyment reading a good narrative, they keep up to speed with what is happening in the world through newspapers and they read magazines connected to their interests. The vast array of text types and the advent of new technologies presents many challenges for our teachers as they work towards trying to incorporate them into the teaching of reading and writing in schools. In this issue we present a number of articles that present research related to the teaching of reading and writing in a context which is characterised by both print and digital texts.

Sylvia Pantaleo in her paper 'The Influence of Postmodern Picturebooks on Three Boys' Narrative Competence' examines how three boys' written and visual texts reflect an understanding of narrative that was developed as a result of their experiences with a collection of postmodern picturebooks. The boys' narratives were not only influenced by these picturebooks but also by other literature they had read and other life experiences. She calls for a review of the ways in which we formally assess students' writing so that we might consider the possibilities of 'multimodal compositions' and narratives other than the traditional linear kind. In the second article some interesting issues relating to the phonics debate are raised. Regina Walsh in her article 'Word games: the importance of defining phonemic awareness' highlights the importance of phonemic awareness for assisting young children to read and write and suggests that the debate around this has been due in part to inaccurate definitions of the concept. Lauren Beatty and Esther Care continue to look at reading instruction in their article 'Learning from their miscues: differences across reading ability and text difficulty'. They report on an extensive study which examined children's use of the three language cueing systems for reading. The study has some interesting findings in relation to how different readers use the various cueing systems when reading difficult and less difficult texts. The fourth article by Len Unsworth and Eveline Chan reports on one aspect of a large study which examined the ways in which Year 6 students understand the different types of image/language relations in online texts dealing with science and social studies topics for primary school. The article raises some important issues similar to Sylvia Pantaleo's article related to the ways in which we need to incorporate multimodal texts into our national assessment programs for reading. Finally Marlene Walters and Heather Fehring report on a study which looked at the teaching of ICT skills with young children. Their research suggested that the integration of ICT, explicit teaching of thinking skills and inquiry-based practice can facilitate student learning across the curriculum.

We hope you enjoy reading these articles and we look forward to receiving contributions from teachers and researchers.