Reading Without Words: Sensory Inclusion and Meaning-Making in Children’s Multimodal Texts

Abstract

In today’s diversified learning environments, children encounter an expanding range of multimodal texts that integrate image, sound, movement, and gesture. Such texts invite new forms of engagement and demand approaches that recognise the sensory as central to literacy learning. This article examines how ten wordless animated short films from the DIALLS project might communicate equity, inclusion, and ethical meaning through sensory and multimodal design. Drawing on critical sensory multimodal literacy and the kineikonic mode, a framework for analysing how image, movement, and sound interact in film, the study interprets these multimodal artefacts as ethical texts that perform, rather than declare, social values. Through close analysis of sound, rhythm, colour, and gesture, the films are shown to translate moral ideas such as fairness, cooperation, and care into sensory and affective forms. This sensory orchestration transforms abstract concepts into embodied experiences, positioning emotion as a precursor to ethical reflection. By positioning literacy as an encounter between perception, relation, and critique, the study argues that multimodal artefacts can extend inclusive literacy practices beyond language. The findings highlight the pedagogical potential of integrating multimodal and sensory media in early literacy contexts, where reading becomes an embodied act of empathy and connection. Ultimately, the article proposes that literacy education gains ethical and aesthetic depth when meaning is experienced as much through the senses as through words.