As a field, rhetoric and composition has made progress toward accepting multimodal reading and writing. We have respected disciplinary journals like Kairos and Composition Studies that accept and encourage innovative multimodal compositions, including websites, podcasts, videos, and other webtexts. This multimodal exposure in academic journals promotes reading these texts as a valid academic practice, and so supports students whose primary ways of engaging with discourses are through multimodal texts. Still, in many fields, multimodal texts remain unpopular and have yet to be widely accepted as part of academic discourses. This understanding of multimodal texts as outside of the standard realm of academic discourse is pervasive and may influence student reading and research selections, enforce a barrier to accessible texts for students, and delegitimize reader experiences across differences. Through my experience as a first-year writing instructor, I’ve found addressing the legitimacy of reading multimodal texts in class through explicit engagement, group discussions, and personal reflections to be helpful in framing multimodal reading as a valid academic practice.
Public attention has recently been directed toward the question of whether engaging with texts in various modes can be considered reading, making it a prime time for scholars of rhetoric and composition to refine our views. The New York Times released an article at the end of 2025 asking “Do Audiobooks Count as Reading?” (Bannon). Brian Bannon, the director of the New York Public Library, admits his initial answer to the question was no. Through interaction with dyslexic readers and acknowledging their use of text-to-speech technology, he reconsidered his answer. He cites a 2019 article from The Journal of Neuroscience (Deniz et al.), finding that “the brains of people reading or listening to the same stories processed meaning in almost the same way.” The distinction he draws to define reading, now, is between an “active” (CCCC, 2021) engagement with the text’s meaning as opposed to a distracted engagement. This expanded view of reading, as being distinguished by active engagement with any text, can be inclusive of multimodal texts and, importantly, responds to changes to reading practices in the last few years: technologically aided audio accompaniments, animations, etc. With such public-facing consideration of this question, rhetoric and composition scholars may do well to question and integrate pedagogy that acknowledges the validity of reading multimodal texts.
Through interdisciplinary classroom discussions with undergraduates on reading, students rarely consider engagement with audiobooks, graphs, videos, or pictorial analyses as reading. In these classroom discussions, I introduced questions that required metacognitive reflection—questions that the students may have never deliberately thought about prior. As such, their initial views likely reflected their educational upbringings, disciplinary experiences, and the values and literacies of their communities. The stigmatization of multimodal texts is deeply ingrained in our cultures and institutions. Anne Wysocki, in “Composing Media Composing Embodiment,” argues that multimodal texts have historically been stigmatized due to sociopolitical power structures, often dismissed as less serious than print and associated with marginalized groups. With a turn in the discipline to explicitly address social justice, validating the reading and readers of multimodal texts is a timely step toward creating inclusive academic spaces. Regardless of our definitions, reading multimodal texts is primary for many people. Blind students may require braille or audio accompaniments. Translingual students may benefit from using diverse media such as images or videos to negotiate literacies and communicate across differences (Canagarajah, 2020). Non-specialized or interdisciplinary academic readers may be more engaged and incentivized to engage with academic discourses that provide multimodal ways of engaging with texts (Januarty and Nima, 2018). To not recognize the validity of reading multimodal texts risks denying the status of “reader” to those whose primary engagements are with multimodal texts a status as a reader. To deny these groups the status of “reader” doesn’t just exclude them from reading print text, but denies them the status of “academic,” “cultured,” or “literate,” so closely associated with reading. With this in mind, legitimizing reading multimodal texts becomes a social justice imperative and an accessibility opportunity–an opportunity to make academic discourse more inclusive and available to diverse audiences.
Academic reading is often understood narrowly as making sense of a print academic article. I argue that critical reading approaches applied to any form of text can qualify as academic reading. The notion of a text has changed over time, notably with the advent of digital technologies. Academic texts were long produced in print, but digital spaces, blended media, and new communicative patterns offer affordances that should expand our notions of what constitutes a text (Kress and Selander, 2012). Understanding academic texts as enhanced by multimodality is a necessary reconception. I use Pamela Takayoshi’s and Cynthia Selfe’s (2007) definition of multimodal: “texts that exceed the alphabetical and may include still and moving images, animators, color, words, music, and sound.” Jody Shipka, in Toward a Composition Made Whole, expanded these conceptions to non-digital multimodal texts such as paintings and drawings. Of reading, I take a broader and inclusive view as the “complex and recursive process in which readers actively and critically understand and create meanings through connections to texts” (CCCC, 2021). These definitions acknowledge pivotal changes in reading, composition, and literacy theories, reflective of the integration of new age communication technologies and inclusive practices in education.
Dan Keller (2013) and Ellen Carillo (2015) summarize some of these changes through the concepts of accumulation and acceleration in their respective works. Accumulation refers to the increasingly diverse types of reading in which students are expected to engage (social media, literature, web-texts). Acceleration refers to the increasing amount of texts people interact with and the frequency/speed at which those interactions are expected to occur. Taken together, changes to reading practices and perceptions are in part reflective of the accumulation of multimodal texts and the frequency in which we interact with these texts.
I introduce my students to the ways their reading practices extend beyond print text through a series of reflective class discussion questions. When prompted to question their own reading practices, and the reading practices of others, both in and outside of classroom contexts, student conceptions of reading expanded to include engagement with multimodal texts.
My questions include the following, and are iterated upon each semester:
1. How do you define reading?
2. Do you consider yourself a good reader? Why?
3. In what practices does a good reader engage?
4. Can these practices be extended beyond a traditional print text?
By considering their own understandings of reading and what it entails, their multimodal reading practices across contexts, and how others engage with multimodal texts, students expand their conceptions of reading and of texts in an academic discourse, legitimizing readers of multimodal texts. The discussions are often colored with rich descriptions of student experiences that acknowledge reading social media posts, graphic novels, video captions, and other multimodal texts. Students are encouraged to co-create understandings of texts, multimodality, and reading in these discussions. I hope they leave validated in their reading practices, acknowledging that active orientation toward engagement with a text (multimodal or otherwise), critical evaluation, and making connections is the heart of academic reading, and they are certainly capable of it.
Legitimizing multimodal reading as a valid academic practice is a human-centered approach to engagement with texts that emphasizes accessibility, diverse reader experiences, and inclusive discourse. Recognizing the validity of multimodal reading encourages students to engage with multimodal texts in their reading and research and creates a social and academic acceptability for those whose primary modes of reading engagement are with multimodal texts. As multimodal texts increasingly make content available to readers across differences, composition and rhetoric scholars concerned with social justice should validate the reading of these texts and work toward the destigmatization of multimodality with our students. With increasing affordances of multimodality and questions of what constitutes reading on a national stage, it is a productive time to incorporate these discussions in our classroom.
References
Arola, K. L., & Wysocki, A. (Eds.). (2012). Composing Media Composing Embodiment. University Press of Colorado.
Canagarajah, A. S. (2020). Transnational literacy autobiographies as translingual writing. London: Routledge.
Carillo, Ellen (2015). Securing a place for reading in composition: The importance of teaching for transfer. University Press of Colorado.
CCCC. (2021). Position statement on the role of reading in college writing classrooms. Conference on College Composition and Communication. https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/the-role-of-reading/
Bannon, Brian. (2025, November 23). Do audiobooks count as reading? The New York Times. Opinion | Do Audiobooks Count as Reading? The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com › 2025/11/23 › opinion › aud…
Deniz, F., Nunez-Elizalde, A. O., Huth, A. G., & Gallant, J. L. (2019). The representation of semantic information across the human cerebral cortex during listening versus reading is invariant to stimulus modality. The Journal of Neuroscience, 39(39), 7722–7736. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0675-19.2019
Keller, Daniel (2013). Chasing literacy: Reading and writing in an age of acceleration. University Press of Colorado.
Kress, G., & Selander, S. (2012). Multimodal design, learning and cultures of recognition. The internet and higher education, 15(4), 265-268.
Januarty, R., & Nima, H. N. A. (2018). Energizing Students’ Reading Comprehension through Multimodal Texts. International Journal of Language Education, 2(2), 14-22.
Shipka, J. L. (2011). Toward a composition made whole (Vol. 163). University of Pittsburgh Press.
Takayoshi, P., & Selfe, C. L. (2007). Thinking about multimodality. Multimodal composition: Resources for teachers, 1-12.
