This research seeks to investigate how learning processes of students on the vocational secondary educational level, who’s reading and writing competences are limited, can be facilitated by a didactical design for learning.

The objective of the didactical design is improvement in the students’ multiliteracy competences.
Through the use of multimodality teaching materials, multimodality tasks and tasks involving transduction between semiotic resources, I will investigate how these students’ learning best can be facilitated. I will also investigate how reading processes of the students can be scaffolded.

I have conducted my research as a design-based research, primarily based on qualitative methods such as focus group interviews, group interviews, assessments of texts made by students, and reflections made by the teacher.
The learning process and my research took place in a class consisting of 40 students in an open learning centre in a vocational secondary school.

On top of a preliminary study, the teacher and I developed a didactical design which she subsequently completed partly based on the use of an i-book.

My research indicates that various of the elements of the design scaffolded the reading and facilitated the learning processes of the students with limited reading and writing competences. It applies to the greatest extent to: the reading guides, the screencasts produced by the teacher and tasks with demands of transduction between semiotic resources.

Moreover, it seems that the elements of the didactical design that focus on multiliteracy and reading strategies, such as memory, organizing, elaboration and monitoring strategies, scaffolded and facilitated the reading and learning processes. It is also indicated by the research that the design facilitated both reading and learning processes of the students more adept in reading and writing.