Creative Reading in Primary Schools: A Synthesis of Transactional, Sociocultural, and Multiliteracies Perspectives

Abstract

Background: Creative reading in primary schools is often reduced to literal comprehension, whereas twenty-first-century literacy demands that students interpret, transform, and design new meanings from diverse forms of text. Novelty: Existing studies tend to examine reader response, scaffolding, and multimodal expression separately, so a framework that unites them for creative reading is still lacking. Objective: This conceptual article therefore aims to synthesize Rosenblatt’s transactional theory, Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, and the multiliteracies framework as foundations for teaching creative reading. Methodology: Using a theory synthesis approach, the study drew on literature collected from Scopus, Google Scholar, DOAJ, ERIC, and Sinta according to relevance and recency criteria, and analyzed the material through thematic coding and narrative synthesis. Key findings: The findings show that the three frameworks are complementary: Rosenblatt’s theory positions the reader’s aesthetic response as the starting point of meaning-making, Vygotsky’s theory explains the role of social interaction and scaffolding within the zone of proximal development, and multiliteracies extend the expression of meaning across multiple modes of representation. Their integration yields a conceptual framework with four propositions: opening space for personal response before analytical tasks, gradually fading teacher support, offering varied modes of post-reading expression, and assessing both thinking processes and products. Implications: Practically, the framework gives teachers a principled basis for designing creative reading lessons, and it gives researchers testable propositions. Because the framework is argumentative and has not been empirically tested, development research, classroom action research, and quasi-experiments are recommended to operationalize and test it in primary schools.