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…

Reading engagement is an essential component of children's reading achievement. This three-chapter dissertation considers a new approach to conceptualizing reading engagement through the lens of children's immersion, or absorption, in a text. Chapter 1 examines the theoretical underpinnings of story world absorption, sometimes known as…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore teacher candidates' response to young adult literature (prose and comics) featuring fat identified protagonists. The paper considers the textual and embodied resources readers use and reject when imagining and interpreting a character's body. This paper explores how readers' meaning making was…

This qualitative study examined the written responses of 58 undergraduate, preservice teachers in three online children's literature courses to the graphic novel, When stars are scattered by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed. Findings from a summative content analysis of participants' written responses showed five response themes: Connections…

The protection and regulation of religious expression present complex challenges. Blasphemy laws, which criminalize acts deemed disrespectful to religious beliefs, have been abolished in England, allowing for broader freedom of expression. However, concerns and discussions about blasphemy persist. The Home Secretary, Suella Braverman (2023), has…

The aim of this research is to examine the impact of reading storybooks and the presence of different characters such as humans, animals, and fantasy characters in storybooks on children's costly sharing behaviour. A total of 235 children participated in the study. The children were presented with 20 stickers and were asked to choose their 10…

We extend research on social annotation in education by implementing a new annotation technique in the literature classroom. Over the course of one year, we invited students to socially annotate literary texts using emojis that reflected their affective responses to those texts. This approach was inspired by new functions of social annotation…

In this paper, we analyse a group of 6 and 7 year olds' interactions during a literacy event. We explore the complexities of their meaning-making following a read aloud of Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak 1963). Our focus is on discourses of gender/sex/uality, a term that acknowledges the complex relationship between gender, sex and sexuality,…

In a rapidly changing information landscape, science communicators need to find new ways to engage audiences, make their information memorable and increase attitudes towards scientists. Evidence suggests that stories could be an effective tool for these goals, but few studies tested experimentally whether they are advantageous to non-stories in…

Objective: To assess the efficacy of utilizing dining hall napkins as a novel health messaging strategy to promote mindfulness. Participants: Undergraduate students at a large Midwestern university. Methods: Utilizing a place-based promotional strategy, mindfulness messages were printed on over 8-million napkins at dining halls. Surveys (N = 573)…

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 paper examines literacy as a sociocultural, personal and human practice dependent on and derived through relationships between people, settings and culture. Drawing on a recent empirical research study that combines learner, teacher and author perspectives [Curtin (2023) "Reading and Writing Pathways Through Children's and Young Adult…

The responses children make during read-alouds bridge meaning from stories. Educators must grasp the value of children's responses and reactions to literature. Children's discourse is central to the reading process; thus, children must be allowed to participate in this learning process. Due to this, the read-aloud process in the classroom should…

Children often prefer nonfiction to fiction books but historically, teachers have neglected nonfiction books during reads alouds. The present study examined how young readers collectively make meaning of nonfiction picturebooks with the help of the teacher and their peers during a whole group interactive read-aloud in one kindergarten classroom.…

Literacy is now an essential part of teaching for Indonesian teachers. This qualitative case study reports on three Indonesian teachers as they integrate the use of children's literature into their literacy instruction. For 4 months, the teachers' efforts to use children's literature were documented through multiple sources such as focus group…