In a graduate literacy course, the author as the teacher educator conceptualized "Visual Literacy" into the course. In-service and pre-service teachers from inner-city schools in Georgia and Virginia invited struggling writers to create graphic novels by envisioning life activities, using drawings, and invented spellings as well as conventional words to tell their family stories. This paradigm shift from a print-based curriculum to multimodal transmediation opened an alternate pathway to literacy, and the children became enthusiastically engaged. Their graphic novels vivified their life experiences, alleviated their pent-up emotions, and made their struggles visible and their inner voices audible. "Visual Literacy" enabled them to transcend the hardships that confronted them and ushered them into academic success.

Clay's Reading Recovery has been one of the most effective one-to-one tutorial sessions. To make the daily lesson more interesting and fully engage the at-risk readers, the author modified Clay's Reading Recovery Program by conceptualizing phonics and semiotics into early intervention. In this case study, three at-risk first graders formed an authors' circle and constructed a variety of signs such as drawing, role playing, storytelling, invented spelling, and kinesthetic movements to expand their potential for understanding and communicating their transaction with the text. The research results positively reflect that phonics and semiotics-based early intervention foster the at-risk early readers' break through the bottleneck to literacy and ensure them on the right track to educational success.