Literacies Across Media: Playing the Text

The contemporary young reader learns from a very early age to read and interpret through a broad range of media. Literacies Across Media explores how a group of boys and girls, aged from ten to fourteen, make sense of narratives in a variety of formats, including print, electronic book, video, DVD, computer game and CD-ROM. This book records these young people over a period of eighteen months as they read, view and play different texts, demonstrating variations and consistencies of interpretative behaviour across different media.

Margaret Mackey analyses how the activities of reading, viewing and playing intertwine and affect each other's development. Her in-depth research shows young readers developing strategies for interpreting narratives through encounters with a diverse range of texts and media. The study breaks new ground in its illustration and exploration of the impact of cross-media fertilisation on how young readers come to an understanding of how to make sense of stories.

Literacies Across Media offers both a vivid account of a group of young readers coming to terms with texts and a radical perspective on the growth of a generation of young readers. It is thought-provoking, fascinating and highly informative reading not only for theoreticians interested in the reading process, but also teachers, librarians, parents and anybody involved with young people and their texts.

Margaret Mackey