Language arts and literacy curricula around the world have been advocating for the teaching and learning of literature in multiple forms. However, apparently in much of classroom practice, little attention has been given to distinguishing the literary distinctiveness of multiple forms of ostensibly the same story. Developing an appreciation of the distinctive interpretive possibilities of multi-version literary narratives may be facilitated by semiotic analyses that indicate how the deployment of image, paralanguage, and language resources have been designed to orient the audience to particular interpretive options. Understanding how to analyze texts to determine such orientations is a crucial aspect of critical literacy. In this paper, we draw on systemic functional linguistics and its extension to the description of the meaning-making resources of image and paralanguage to focus on how differences in characterization are achieved in three versions of the story of Coraline.

Communication using popular digital media involves understanding multimodal systems of appraisal for expressing attitude, which traditionally deals with emotions, ethics, and aesthetics in language. The formulation and teaching of multimodal grammars for attitudinal meanings in popular texts and culture is currently underresearched. This article reports findings from multisite qualitative research that developed students’ ability to use semiotic resources for communicating attitude multimodally. The research participants were 68 students (ages 9–11 years) from two elementary schools. Students learned how to use attitudinal language—affect, judgment, and appreciation—and applied this knowledge to multimodal design. The findings advance a leading system of appraisal for discourse by adapting the system to the multimodal communication of attitude in digital comic making in schooling. The research is significant because it demonstrates the potentials for augmenting students’ linguistic and visual semiotic resources to convey multimodal attitudinal meanings in contemporary communication.