Picturebooks play a vital role in the lives and learning of young children. These complex, multimodal texts offer unique opportunities for meaning-making as readers engage with the interplay between text and illustrations. Picturebooks offer children stepping stones into the literary arts, providing information and storylines that illuminate…

Young children read wordless books as an important early literacy learning activity. This study explores oral narrative construction and image reading of a wordless book by six K-2 children. Through a cross-case analysis, the results indicate growth of coherence and cohesion building in the verbal narratives across grade levels, as well as a…

This article explores the potential for engaging 7 and 8-year-old school pupils in performative literature interpretation through process drama. Inspired by new materialism and affect theory, we focus on how literature interpretations come into being in dramatic fiction, and on how these becoming interpretations merge with the classroom. The study…

Reading aloud to children is a ubiquitous practice in early childhood settings. While there are many recommendations for how educators should conduct these experiences, little research in the past decade has examined how read-alouds are actually accomplished. Using anthropological and sociological theories of learning, literacy and research, our…

Autistic learners master visual and spatial abilities; they use visual language to organise, understand and give meaning to the world. Although they might struggle with verbal skills, they have an associative way of thinking. Taking into consideration the characteristics of seven autistic pupils, the aim of this paper was to identify the potential…

Child-produced marginalia, annotations written or drawn in the margins of a text by a young reader, have been stigmatized as devaluing the book on which it was created and often dismissed as "graffiti." Recent historical studies of marginalia created by older children, those who have mastered conventional writing and drawing, have…

This eight-month study, conducted in a first-grade classroom in the southwestern United States, analyzed young children's playful responses to literature. It focuses on framing a theory that underpins play as a form of reader response, which I term 'responsive play'. It further aims to answer the overarching research question and the sub-question:…

This multiple case study is part of a larger investigation of literacy practices in "Our Home," an after-school program that provides learning support to children from refugee backgrounds. I asked, "What happens when translingual children from refugee backgrounds respond to multicultural, transnational, and translingual…

The aim of this study was to identify and characterize children's perspectives on a picture book's themes and characters by examining their drawings. The study was conducted over a five-month period in a public kindergarten in southern Taiwan, with six children aged 5-6 years. Picture book appreciation activities focused on eight picture books.…

One of the purposes of the classroom-based research featured in this article was to explore how the ongoing development of young children's understanding of elements of visual art and design would affect their comprehension, interpretation and analysis of the artwork in a selection of picturebooks. Social semiotics, multimodality, sociocultural…

Images of childhood are ideas and expectations of childhood and children, and are reflections of individual perception and cultural ideologies. In writing children's books, authors draw on their conscious and unconscious thoughts of childhood to create an implied reader. In this paper I investigate images of childhood through examination of the…

As part of its proposal to the U.S. Department of Education, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) committed to developing Kindergarten through Grade 2 Model Content Frameworks for English language arts (ELA)/literacy (K-2 Model Content Frameworks) to serve as a bridge between the Common Core State Standards…

This article explores how reading strategy instruction that targets children's literature can unwittingly interfere with the development of a reading life. It compares the use of story-based children's literature for reading strategy instruction with the "untaught" story. It asks: What, if any, role does a read aloud that is unfettered by formal…

This study examines the racial discourses of six and seven year old Puerto Rican children participating in small group literature circles over one academic year. The main research question is "How do Puerto Rican young children in a multiage classroom construct race through dialogue within the figured worlds of literature circles?" This study…

Although there is evidence that the use of picture books affects young children's achievement scores in mathematics, little is known about the cognitive engagement and, in particular, the mathematical thinking that is evoked when young children are read a picture book. The focus of the case study reported in this article is on the cognitive…