Students writing for an authentic audience in service-learning composition courses often face a double-audience dilemma. The texts they compose must suit the demands of the real-world audience of the service-learning project while also meeting the expectations of the academic audience. This article examines the role multimodal composition may play in helping alleviate the tension of the double audience, particularly for basic writers.

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Henry, Hilst and Fox argue for expanding basic writing to include multimodal communications and digital literacies alongside print-based literacies. After defining key terms related to multimodal composition, the authors describe teaching and learning strategies related to visual and oral/aural communication modalities.

Lutkewitte acknowledges that digital natives read and write differently than people whose literacy practices primarily involve printed materials. After describing these differences, the author explores implications for future digital native writing instructors as both teachers and scholars. As they put their digital literacies into practice in academia, digital native writing instructors will challenge 20th century modes of writing instruction and notions of authorship to foster the 21st century literacies developing in and outside of the academy.

Alexander, Powell and Green explore ways in which traditional, nontraditional, and basic writing students view the affordances (potentials and limitations) of multimodal composition. These potentials include layering, implicit persuasion, audience awareness, creativity, and affective appeals, and the limitation of a lack of a clear thesis. In conclusion, the authors offer pedagogical considerations for instructors who assign multimodal composition in their classrooms.

Basic writing students' photo essays demonstrate that the multimodal composition process affords opportunities to participate in engaging conversations about writing. The authors argue that the incorporation of multimodal assignments in the basic writing classroom promotes both digital and print literacies while fostering awareness of students' own writing processes.

Wuebben describes a multimodal writing project that he used in an adult oriented college literature course in New York City. Students were asked to read and interpret several novels, including White Noise by Don DeLillo--the focus of this essay. Moving out of the classroom and into their lower Manhattan Wall Street neighborhood, adult undergraduates experiemented with YouTube, hand-held video cameras, and cell phone recordings to depict scenes similar to those in White Noise. Wuebben concludes that students benefitted from participating in the project: it enhanced their interest in the novel, introduced non-traditional forms of literary interpretation, and challenged students to experiment with video recording as an approach to interpreting literature.

Lay examines the role of multimodal composition in influencing basic writers’ perspective on writing and fostering their agency in and facility with composing. The author concludes that opportunities for multimodality in the basic writing classroom help students to both challenge traditional forms they may mistrust, articulate an individual understanding of composing as a process and successfully complete assignments in a variety of rhetorical modes.

Shapiro describes challenges instructors confront when designing multimodal basic writing coursework while commenting on benefits afforded to students. Drawing on her teaching experiences in basic writing and Upward Bound classes, she offers sample assignments and provides a framework for creating curricula based on multimodal, academic and home literacies. Book Review: Shimmering Literacies