Abstract
Children as readers of picture books and the ways they respond to, and make meaning from, such texts are the focus of this article, which reports on a small-scale study undertaken in Norway and Wales, UK. The theoretical framing of the research draws on concepts of the multimodal ensemble in picture books and of the reading event as part of a social practice. The research design was developed from the team’s analysis of two texts, Pappa by Svein Nyhus (1998) and What does Daddy Do? by Rachel Bright (2009). Twenty-four children, who were 7 and 8 years old, took part in the study. This was built around two reading events for each book, staged as an immediate response and as a guided response. The data subsequently collected were analysed according to three overarching organisational principles, as book world, real world and play world. For both Daddy and Pappa, the first reading event showed the children’s responses were mainly directed towards exploring the book world. On the second reading event, references to the real world predominated for Daddy, while for Pappa the book world was again dominant. Across both reading events and for both books, the play world revealed those occasions when the children expanded the meaning of the story, demonstrating an inventive ability to play with the text. Overall, the children’s responses moved fluidly across the three worlds, showing them to be energetically making connections between the reading, their experience of books and their own lives.
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Notes
It was necessary to provide a translation for the two books: Pappa into English and Daddy into Norwegian. The author Sven Nyhus provided the translation of Pappa and the researchers that for Daddy.
This article does not compare the reading events in terms of any cultural and social variations between Norway and Wales. These aspects will form the basis of a later analysis.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to express our gratitude for receiving a small grant covering the costs of meetings from University of Agder/The Research Council of Norway. We would also like to thank the children and adults in the settings where we collected the data. Finally, we very much appreciated the advice and guidance offered by Cathy Butler in preparing the article for publication.
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Adela Baird was formerly a Senior Research Fellow of the University of Edinburgh and is now an independent scholar in Cardiff. She has extensive experience of education in Scotland, England and Wales as a teacher, teacher educator, academic and one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors. Her research interests are language and literacy, children who learn English as a second language and improving education for disadvantaged children.
Janet Laugharne is Professor Emeritus of language in education at the School of Education, Cardiff Metropolitan University. She has extensive knowledge of teacher education and training, specialising in language and literacy education. Her research interests are in language and literacy, bilingualism with particular reference to Welsh, narrative and applied metalinguistics.
Eva Maagero is Professor in Norwegian language at Vestfold University College Norway where she teaches and researches linguistics, language development, literacy, text theory, semiotics and multimodality on Bachelor and Master’s programmes. She has published extensively in these areas.
Elise Seip Tonnesen is Professor in the Department of Nordic and Media Studies, University of Agder. She has extensive teaching experience in teacher training, Norwegian and Media Studies and has published numerous books on children’s literature, complex texts, television and film, and about cultural perspectives on language and text.
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Baird, A., Laugharne, J., Maagerø, E. et al. Child Readers and the Worlds of the Picture Book. Child Lit Educ 47, 1–17 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-015-9244-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-015-9244-4