Children Reading Picturebooks

Interpreting visual texts

Evelyn Arizpe, Morag Styles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317407591
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Children Reading Pictures has made a huge impact on teachers, scholars and students all over the world. The original edition of this book described the fascinating range of children's responses to contemporary picturebooks, which proved that they are sophisticated readers of visual texts and are able to make sense of complex images on literal, visual and metaphorical levels. Through this research, the authors found that children are able to understand different viewpoints, analyse moods, messages and emotions, and articulate personal responses to picture books - even when they struggle with the written word.The study of picturebooks and children's responses to them has increased dramatically in the 12 years since the first edition was published. Fully revised with a review of the most recent theories and critical work related to picturebooks and meaning-making, this new edition demonstrates how vital visual literacy is to children's understanding and development. The second edition:

• Includes three new case studies that address social issues, special needs and metafiction
• Summarises key finding from research with culturally diverse children
• Draws upon new research on response to digital picturebooks
• Provides guidelines for those contemplating research on response to picturebooks

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This book is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of children's literature as well as providing important reading for Primary and Early Years teachers, literacy co-ordinators and all those interested in picturebooks.

Part 1 The original empirical research on children responding to picturebooks

DOI: 10.4324/9781315683911-1

Chapter 1 Research design, methodology and underpinning theory

DOI: 10.4324/9781315683911-2

To read the artist’s picture is to mobilise our memories and our experience of the visible world and to test his image through tentative projections. . . . It is not the ‘innocent eye’, however, that can achieve this match but only the inquiring mind that knows how to probe the ambiguities of vision.

(Gombrich 1962: 264)

The great art critic, Ernst Gombrich, draws our attention to the ‘inquiring mind’ that is required to understand and analyse the visual world. This book shows that even very young children have inquiring minds and that picturebooks are the vehicles that can ‘probe the ambiguities of vision’.

The aims of the original study

The principal aim of our original research was to investigate how multimodal texts were interpreted by children, to explore the potential of visual literacy and to find out more about the skills children needed to deal with visual texts. Some of the questions we set ourselves had not been asked before of readers aged 4–11. When confronted with complex picturebooks, how did children make sense of narrative? What were the specific skills that young readers brought to interpreting visual texts? How did they perceive the relationship between word and image? How could they best articulate their response? Did the reading background of the children affect their viewing? What part did visual texts such as films and other media play in their ability to analyse pictures? What did children’s own drawings reveal about their perception of a picturebook? What did complex picturebooks teach them about looking? How did talking about a book in depth, with their peers and with adults, affect their responses? What was the relationship between thinking and seeing?

Research design

The research design was based on the conclusions of a pilot study during which our research instruments were refined. The basic structure was as follows: we worked in seven primary schools serving varied catchment areas, interviewing two boys and two girls per class from three different classes per school, one of which was early years (4–6), one lower primary (7–9) and one upper primary (9–11). This meant we worked closely with twelve children of varying ages in each school, usually requiring three whole-day visits as well as preliminary conferences with teachers. We also identified two further children from each age group in case of illness; these children were not interviewed but they were invited to take part in semi-structured group interviews. We revisited one-third of the sample several months after the initial interviews. We used three picturebooks overall but only one with any given group of children.

The picturebooks

We spent some time trialling a range of picturebooks by contemporary artists to find examples of multi-layered texts which would appeal equally to children aged 4–11; this proved no easy task. However multilayered and inviting the picturebook, so many were discarded as they simply would not straddle the wide age group. In the end we settled on Zoo and The Tunnel by Anthony Browne and Lily Takes a Walk by Satoshi Kitamura, all highly rated examples of picturebook art with appeal to both younger and older children according to our pilot study and ideal for in-depth discussion. Each picturebook was to be used in at least two schools to allow for comparison: The Tunnel was read in three of the seven schools; Lily and Zoo were each read in two schools. Both artists were interviewed at length and were supportive of the project.¹

The schools

Seven primary schools participated in the research, ranging from multi-ethnic and economically deprived settings in north London to suburban schools in Essex. The schools were chosen to include those with differing intakes in terms of social class, though we did not systematically control for these variables, confining ourselves to collecting data on the proportion of pupils having free school meals.

Table 1.1 Schools' socio-economic information

School	Population	Socio-economic information	Free school meals (%)
A	363	City council estate, mainly working class	22
B	466	Suburban, mixed housing, working/middle class	7
C	400	City, mixed housing, working/middle class	12
D	300	Suburban, middle class	9
E	518	Outer London borough, working class (32% ethnic minority pupils)	33
F	550	Outer London borough, working class (70% ethnic minority pupils)	30
G	898	Outer London borough, mixed housing (40% ethnic minority pupils)	52

All of the schools were to some extent multi-ethnic and multilingual, with the exception of School D in the south-east of England, where the pupils were predominantly white, monolingual speakers of English. This was in contrast to the London schools, where a whole spread of ethnic groups could be found, including a large percentage of refugees from the African and Asian subcontinents. Of the three schools in Cambridge, around 20 per cent of the pupils spoke more than one language.

The children

The interview sample was constructed in order to produce equal representation of boys and girls and to include children from diverse class and ethnic backgrounds. In addition, the class teacher’s estimate of the reading ability of each child was obtained, providing a useful point of comparison when assessing children’s ability to read pictures. Researchers had no knowledge of these reading abilities until after the interviews took place, though we had asked teachers to select two experienced and two relatively inexperienced readers. In the event, teachers took a fair bit of licence with our requests, including children who were fairly average readers and often selecting ‘interesting’ children whom they thought the experience would be good for. Overall, we had a sample of children from 4 to 11 years old with a wide range of abilities responding to the same questions based on the picturebook used in their school.

Approximately 35 per cent of the interviewed children were bilingual with varying linguistic backgrounds, from two pupils who had recently arrived in the UK with little knowledge of English to third-generation bilinguals.² Where necessary, interviews were conducted with a translator. A few children had slight learning difficulties associated with moderate dyslexia, autism and hyperactivity, but these were not found to interfere with their responses. Despite some shyness at the beginning of the interviews, and once they were assured this was not a test, most children were eager to participate, to answer the interviewer’s questions and to draw, and by the time of the group discussion were almost always completely involved in the picturebook. When roughly one-third of the sample were re-interviewed a few months later, they remembered the initial interviews and could recall many details of the books even though most had not seen them for a few months. We have changed the names of all the children in the study, the pseudonyms taking account of ethnicity.

The questionnaire

In order to provide a context against which to set our results, we used a short questionnaire to find out about the reading habits of the pupils in the seven schools that participated in the study.³ It invited information on their favourite picturebooks, television programmes, videos and computer games. A total of 486 children from Reception to Year 6 (ages 4 to 11) answered the questionnaire (see Appendix 1), which provided us with a glimpse of the reading backgrounds of pupils as well as of their interests by age and gender. We did not notice any significant difference in response by children who knew the authors’ work we were using before the exercise began and those who didn’t. What made a huge difference to the level of response was children’s previous exposure to a wide range of texts. Having said that, it was also exciting to note the number of children without much apparent experience of books who showed great facility in reading pictorial texts.

The pupils' reading backgrounds

The data from the questionnaire revealed fewer differences between schools in terms of children’s reading habits and preferences than we had expected to find. However, it was clear that the pupils in the three London schools (Schools E, F and G) had less exposure to books (at least in English) than pupils in the other schools. The economically disadvantaged catchment area of these schools was probably a reason for this, as well as the fact that English was not the first language in many of their homes. They also had less access to videos and computer games, but, like their counterparts in the other schools, their preference for these was far greater than for books.

The crucial role of the school in facilitating access to books at Key Stage 1 (ages 4–7) became evident through the questionnaires. Results revealed that approximately 60 per cent of pupils from schools F, G and A read mostly in school, while nearly 90 per cent of those in schools B and D (more ‘middle-class’ schools) read mostly at home. These figures changed at Key Stage 2 (ages 7–11), with students in all schools reading mainly at home. At this stage there was a slight increase in the preference for books, although videos and computer games were still more popular, and the reading of magazines and comics increased noticeably.

All told, the list of picturebooks mentioned by children was quite limited and 7 seems to be the peak age for reading them, with more girls than boys mentioning this genre. It was also when other reading, from non-fiction to magazines and comics, began to increase, presumably because children became more independent readers. The data from the questionnaire suggested that most of the children’s contact with images had occurred through media texts rather than through books.

Overall, in 2003, the list for other types of texts far outweighed that for picturebooks. It would be interesting to see what differences would emerge if we applied a similar questionnaire in 2015.

The interviews

In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 84 children, 21 of whom were followed up in a second interview several months later. An interview schedule was closely followed, normally 45 minutes long, with about ten questions common to all, and a further ten which were book specific (these questions can be found in the Appendices). We began by asking about the appeal of the cover and how it showed what the picturebook might be about (later in the interviews we asked if, in retrospect, the covers were right for the books). We asked children to tell us about each page or double spread that we had selected in turn, using both specific and open-ended questions. We invited them to show us their favourite pictures, to tell us how they read pictures and to talk about the relationship between words and pictures. We questioned them about the actions, expressions and feelings of the characters; the intratextual and intertextual elements; what the artist needed to know in order to draw, and the ways in which he/she used colour, body language and perspective, etc. In addition, we took research notes that included reference to children’s body language (pointing, gazing, tone of voice, use of hand, facial expressions) while reading the books. All the sessions were taped and transcribed.

Group discussions

After the individual interviews, the children participated in a group discussion with other members of their class who had been interviewed, plus two extra children who had been identified by the teacher in case of the absence of the interviewees. In total, 126 pupils were involved in these discussions, which lasted up to an hour and which were normally conducted later in the same day. During these discussions, the researchers were free to review interesting issues that had come up in the interviews, open up new areas for debate, including those chosen by children, and give those who had not been interviewed a chance to grapple with the book.

Revisiting

Preliminary findings indicated that repeated readings of a picturebook could be an important element in pupils constructing meaning, so we were interested to find out whether significant changes in interpretation had occurred some time after the initial research. Accordingly, we decided to carry out follow-up interviews three to six months after initial interviews with roughly one fifth of our original sample, i.e. one child from each class. The children were chosen to represent a range of responses to the first interviews – from children who had been outstandingly articulate or passionate about the book the first time round, to those who had barely been willing to participate, from children with specific learning difficulties to those who were described by their teachers as more or less average readers. In the revisiting, the emphasis of the questions changed from detailed examination of individual pages to a consideration of the book as a whole.

Procedures

Five different researchers carried out the interviews in schools. Their role was to follow the interview schedules as closely as possible, while allowing for flexibility in following children’s leads and pursuing further questioning when they thought it appropriate to do so. Analysis of the transcripts showed that each researcher had their ow...