ABSTRACT
In recent times, considerable attention has moved away from the use of traditional methods of scaffolding comprehension. Children’s books, during classroom interactions, require varied and novel comprehension strategies because of new multimodal affordances and pedagogical methods. By using a children’s science book as an illustrative resource, this paper provides an alternative way of describing, decomposing, and processing children’s reading materials successfully. The rationale is that reading materials at the intermediate level gradually become complex as the child progresses to meet the challenges of upper-level material. It proposes a multilayered analysis by the use of multimodal discourse analysis to scaffold teaching of reading materials for children. Hence, this study presents a multimodal string model to aid the teacher. The theoretical framework is predicated on gestalt design approach, systemic functional theory, cohesion theory and genre theory. Its methodology is descriptive and allows for a triangulated approach to text-processing which uses the following constructs: gestalt design, semantic role, sense relation, logico-semantic realisation and rhetorical mode. The selected sample is representative of children’s books commonly found in Nigeria and are available to intermediate reading material in school libraries. The selected book provides data which is subjected to a multi-layered analysis. From the findings of the study, a bottom-up multi-layered analysis reveals a fine-grained understanding of a text. This enables one to extract features for word inventory, meaning-making relationships and reading cues across written text and visual image continuum. The paper concludes that this expanded form of inter-semiotic complementarity helps in scaffolding text for reading. Consequently, it recommends that any layer from the multimodal string model can be employed for analysis, depending on the grade and age of learners. It also recommends that teachers in rural and semi-urban schools where reading challenges are prevalent should adapt this text processing method for multimodal literacy.
Keywords:
multimodal, discourse, text, image, scaffolding, children
DOI: 10.36349/alqajolls.2026.v01i02.007
author/Badaki, Jude V., Ph.D & Anani, Oluwabunmi A.
journal/AL-QALAM JLLS 1(2) | June 2026
