"Multimedia and Literacy Development" broadens the field of reading research by looking beyond print-only experiences to young readers' encounters with multimedia stories on the Internet and DVD. Multimedia storybooks include, in addition to static pictures and written text, features such as oral text, animations, sounds, zooms, and scaffolds designed to help convey meaning. These features are changing how young children read text, and also provide technology-based scaffolds for helping struggling readers. This book reports experimental research and practices with multimedia stories indicating that new dimensions of media contribute to young children's ability to understand stories and to read texts independently. It is the first synthesis of research in this field. Four key themes are highlighted: (1) Understanding the Multimedia Environment for Learning; (2) Designing Multimedia Applications for Learning; (3) New Approaches to Storybook Reading; (4) Multimedia Applications in Classroom Instruction. Chapters are written in jargon-free language intended to be accessible to an international audience of researchers, policymakers, program developers, and media specialists.The book is appropriate for university courses about literacy and information technology and will be essential to the numerous professionals interested in early literacy and early interventions.