Clare Painter

University of New South Wales, Austalia

Children’s picture book narratives: reading sequences of images

Children’s first experiences of written narratives are in the form of picture books, and these sophisticated multimodal texts are increasingly being produced for older readers as well. As yet, however, mother tongue literacy education has focussed primarily on written forms of language and regarded images in picture books as functioning transparently to facilitate young learners’ access to linguistic meaning. The pioneering work of Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) however, alerts us to the range of meanings carried by the ‘grammar’ of visual images, which goes far beyond ‘illustrating’ the verbal text (see e.g. Lewis 2001).

This paper will report preliminary research into visual analysis of well-known contemporary picture books in English, carried out in collaboration with Talia Gill, Jim Martin and Len Unsworth at the University of Sydney. The project aims to develop Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) work to take greater account of inter-visual (and eventually inter-modal) meanings in narrative, rather than single page, texts so as to enhance our engagement in visual literacy education. Issues to be raised in this discussion include the need to recognise intervisual semantic relationships of both expansion and projection, the particular importance of circumstantial setting, and the subtlety of reader positioning via visual as well as verbal focalization.

References:

Kress, G. & Van Leeuwen, T. (1996) Reading Images London: Routledge

Lewis, D. (2001) Reading Contemporary Picture Book: Picturing Text