Textual thinking as evidenced through think-alouds: Designing meanings in interpreting authentic L2 web texts

Recent scholarship in multiliteracies-oriented pedagogies has advocated for greater attention to fostering ‘textual thinking’, understood as forms of literacy that consider the complexities of semiotic choices made by authors, and their underlying meanings, rhetorical purposes, and cultural contexts. This kind of engagement with texts calls upon readers to focus on form–meaning connections, and shifts the focus of reading purposes, toward reading as a form of participation in everyday literacy practices, and reading as a way of thinking critically about representation and communication. This article presents findings from an empirical study investigating the reading processes of second language (L2) French learners while interpreting an authentic multimodal web text, guided by tasks informed by multiliteracies. A prompted think-aloud methodology was used to capture learners’ dynamic meaning-making processes. Drawn from a larger group of participants ( n = 9), the current article reports on three unique cases, documenting their engagement with different semiotic modes and their evolving interpretations. The participants performed three phases of reading tasks: skimming for predictions about topic and authorship, scanning for specific details, and tracking webs of text signals. Participants saw the question prompts prior to each task phase, and again at the end of the phase, with multiple choice response options. Findings demonstrate participants’ unique sets of interpretations and processes in terms of the way they drew differently upon various domains of background knowledge, genre knowledge, and reading strategies; the way they attended to various linguistic and non-linguistic modes; and the way the tasks guided their reading. The article concludes by suggesting several concrete instructional practices for L2 literacy development, including tasks that are adaptable for a range of languages.