Pictures, images and deep reading

Bland, Janice

Zusammenfassung

This paper considers the support provided by multimodal children’s literature in the development of literacy. The focus is on reading in a second language and the negotiation of understanding due to information gaps in the narrative, and on reading pleasure due to sensory anchoring through pictures. The development of deep reading is differentiated from the acquisition of functional literacy skills. Further, the differentiation between the medium-embeddedness of pictures and the perceptual-transactional and culturally shaped nature of images is highlighted with regard to the affordances of pictures in picturebooks and graphic novels. In some children’s literature, the opportunities for meaningful booktalk are amplified by an apparently simple style of illustration. This process has been termed amplification through simplification, which, in contrast to simplifying by stereotyping, can help lead to intercultural understanding and deep reading. The affordances of pictures in supporting young adult readers to create a mental model of a storyworld is discussed with reference to two panels from Coraline (Gaiman & Russell, 2008), a graphic novel.