Learning from Picturebooks

Perspectives from child development and literacy studies

Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Jörg Meibauer, Kerstin Nachtigäller, Katharina J. Rohlfing, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Jörg Meibauer, Kerstin Nachtigäller, Katharina J. Rohlfing

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317961529
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Research in Education

Picturebooks, understood as a series of meaningful text-picture relations, are increasingly acknowledged as an autonomous sub-genre of children's literature. Being highly complex aesthetic products, their use is deeply embedded in specific situations of joint attention between a caregiver and a child. This volume focuses on the question of what children may learn from looking at picturebooks, whether printed in a book format, created in a digital format, or self-produced by educationalists and researchers.Interest in the relationship between cognitive processes and children's literature is growing rapidly, and in this book, theoretical frameworks such as cognitive linguistics, cognitive narratology, cognitive poetics, and cognitive psychology, have been applied to the analysis of children's literature. Chapters gather empirical research from the fields of literary studies, linguistics and cognitive psychology together for the first time to build a cohesive understanding of how picturebooks assist learning and development.International contributions explore:

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• language acquisition

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• the child's cognitive development

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• emotional development

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• literary acquisition ("literary literacy")

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• visual literacy.

Divided into three parts considering symbol-based learning, co-constructed learning, and learning language skills, this cross-disciplinary volume will appeal to researchers, students and professionals engaged in children's literature and literacy studies, as well as those from the fields of cognitive and developmental psychology, linguistics, and education.

Part I

Symbol-based learning in picturebooks

1 Picturebooks and early literacy

How do picturebooks support early conceptual and narrative development?

Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Jörg Meibauer

Introduction

This contribution builds upon two strands of our joint research. The first is to explore the interaction between language acquisition and the acquisition of children’s literature (Meibauer 2011; Kümmerling-Meibauer and Meibauer 2013). The second is to explore the nature of picturebooks with respect to children’s cognitive development of which language development is a part (e.g. Kümmerling-Meibauer and Meibauer 2005, 2011c). Our basic assumptions can be put into the following hypotheses guiding our research (Kümmerling-Meibauer and Meibauer 2013).

Assumption 1

Children’s literature is a specific input in the process of language acquisition. A theory of language acquisition has to reflect on how this specific input supports the acquisition process.

We will show that picturebooks reflect children’s early development. In particular, picturebooks support children’s conceptual development by showing them pictures that reflect relevant categories, and by engaging them in conversations about concepts and categories.

Assumption 2

Children’s literature is important for the acquisition of literature in general. A theory of literature acquisition has to consider how the use of children’s literature supports literature acquisition.

Since there is no narrative without descriptive content, we will show that early descriptive picturebooks lay the ground for narrative picturebooks. Moreover, the early acquisition of narratives is seen as the basis for later literature acquisition.

Assumption 3

A crucial property of children’s literature is to be accommodated to the cognitive and linguistic abilities of children in different developmental stages. A theory of children’s literature has to explain this property.

We will show that there is an adaptation to the child’s cognitive and linguistic abilities. However, for lack of space we cannot deeply go into the realm of poetic, aesthetic, and emotional aspects of early literature. We leave that for another occasion.

Against the background of these assumptions, the outline of our contribution is as follows. In the next section, we will deal with what we call “picturebook spurt”, a neologism coined on the basis of the term “vocabulary spurt”, which is used in research on lexical acquisition. The third section focuses on the descriptive–narrative distinction that plays a crucial role when it comes to the young child’s acquisition of narrative abilities. The fourth section addresses the significance of knowledge acquisition and how children learn from testimony, based on picturebooks that impart knowledge about hygiene. The fifth section delves into the impact of literary characters and genres upon children’s conceptual development. Finally, we will draw some conclusions from our investigations and address future research topics.

Picturebook spurt: from conceptual classes to early narratives

In Kümmerling-Meibauer and Meibauer (2005, 2011a), we developed the category of “early-concept books” and elaborated on noun- and verb-related early concepts. The notion of early-concept book refers to those picturebooks that show single objects from the child’s surroundings, such as a ball, a doll, an apple, or a chair. Prominent examples have been created by Dutch illustrator Dick Bruna, but also by renowned artists such as Tana Hoban, Emmanuel Sougez, Edward Steichen, and Andy Warhol.¹ These picturebooks target children between 12 and 18 months of age and usually do not contain any text; sometimes a single word denotes the depicted object. Since they are the first picturebooks very young children typically encounter, at least in Western countries, they introduce the child not only to the “rules of book behaviour” (Lewis 2001: 135) – that is, sitting still, turning the pages, looking and pointing at the pictures – but also to basic skills of perception, such as (1) the differentiation between figure and ground; (2) the recognition of lines, points, and colors as inseparable parts of the depicted item; (3) the understanding that two-dimensional images stand for three-dimensional objects; and (4) the knowledge of learned visual schemata (Nodelman 1988; Nikolajeva 2003; Kümmerling-Meibauer and Meibauer 2005: 332f.). Besides acquainting children with crucial visual codes that induct them into visual literacy, these picturebooks also support the young child’s lexical acquisition. It is not merely a coincidence that the depicted objects are labeled through nouns. Nouns play an important role in the early lexicon, since approximately 44 percent of the first 50 words learned by children are nouns (Bloom 2000). However, understanding the meaning of words is quite a demanding task because children have to learn the prototypical features that constitute a concept (Murphy 2002). A concept comprises the verbal knowledge that enables the child to refer to a given entity. Thus, if a child has acquired the concept DOLL, she or he is able to refer to dolls. In this regard, a picture of a doll might support the child’s acquisition of concepts (for a more detailed analysis, see Kümmerling-Meibauer and Meibauer 2011a).

Hence, we propose the notion “early-concept book” for this book type because its basic function is fostering the acquisition of early concepts. Early concepts belong to the young child’s early lexicon and are usually acquired between 12 and 18 months of age. These early concepts do not only encompass nouns, but also verbs, such as to have, to make, to play, and to eat. Although plenty of early-concept books focus on nouns, there are also early-concept books that display actions which are expressed by verbs. Helen Oxenbury’s Playing (1981) and Judith Drews’ Antons ganze Welt (Anton’s Whole World, 2010) are two examples of early-concept books that focus on verbal concepts. Consequently, early-concept books have important properties from the point of view of cognitive and conceptual development.

Nouns and verbs surely play an important role in the early lexicon, but children between 12 and 18 months of age already know other word categories as well: for example, adjectives (hot, high), personal-social words (yes, hello, thanks), relational words (there, again), pronouns (you, my) and onomatopoetic words (bow-wow) (Barrett 1995; Clark 1993; Dromi 1987; Kauschke 2000; Kauschke and Hofmeister 2002; Meibauer and Rothweiler 1999). These word categories, as well as abstract concepts such as LOVE, are not easy to depict, and yet there are attempts to visualize them, as for instance in Annette Langen’s Noch mal! Meine ersten Lieblingswörter (Once Again! My First Favorite Words, 2012), in which children are introduced to personal-social words (bye-bye, hello) and relational words (more, there), among others. Nevertheless, since the 1970s early-concept books focusing on adjectives, onomatopoetic words and antonyms have come to the fore. In Tana Hoban’s Push/Pull – Empty/Full (1973), the properties are arranged in accordance with the contrast principle of antonyms (big–little; dark–light) and illustrated by objects that prototypically present the respective properties, such as a stone for “heaviness” or a feather for “lightness”. Onomatopoetic words expressed by noises turn up in the French book Le livre des bruits (The Book of Noises, 2004) by Soledad Bravi, while antonyms are frequently used in Didier Cornille’s Mini maxi. Le livre des contraires (The Book of Contrasts, 2009). Interestingly, in order to depict these parts of speech the presence of objects is essential. Activities, properties, and noises are usually depicted with respect to objects, since it is hard, if not impossible, to depict them purely as concepts.

While many of these words still belong to the child’s early lexicon, these books present a transition from the early-concept book to another book type that might be called “concept book”. In contrast to early-concept books displaying common objects from different conceptual domains, concept books go a step further in that they depict objects that belong to a single conceptual domain, such as toys, animals, vehicles, food, or clothes. Typical examples of this book type are Helmut Spanner’s Mein Spielzeug (My Toys, 1989) and Chez Picthall’s Baby Sees Farm Animals (2008). Picturebooks that display abstract concepts, for example colors, shapes, numbers, and letters, can also be assigned to this book category. Prominent examples are Tana Hoban’s Red, Blue, Yellow Shoe (1986), Keith Haring’s Ten (1998), and Dick Bruna’s B Is for Bear (1967). These concept books usually do not have any text at all, but sometimes include single words on the same page or alternate pages that denote the objects or the objects’ characteristics (color, shape, number). Although these picturebooks depict objects that refer to nominal concepts as well, the words expressing these concepts mostly do not occur in the child’s early lexicon but are acquired later, when children are about 18 to 24 months old, or perhaps even older. This age span is characterized by a vocabulary spurt. While most children have a repertoire of 50 words by the age of 18 months, the lexicon seems to “explode” after that stage, and children acquire new words on a daily basis, thus enlarging their lexicon and knowledge about concepts at an astonishing pace.

However, the vocabulary spurt goes hand in hand with a picturebook spurt. The expanding market of picturebooks for young children is responsible for an increasing range of topics, themes, genres, and styles. This development leads to the creation of book types that serve different purposes at the same time. They might be used for a pointing and naming game, for searching for hidden things, for stimulating a question–answer dialogue, for categorizing, for the comprehension of speech acts and deixis, and even for a basic understanding of poetic practices, such as rhyme, rhythm, and emphasis. Nevertheless, these picturebooks still have discernible key concepts.

First of all, concept books mainly serve to support the young child’s acquisition of categorization. Categorization enables the child to build up a network of interrelated concepts. Furthermore, acquisition of conceptual domains not only expands the child’s lexicon but might also be regarded as a first step towards an understanding of coherence, in this special case by a coordination of objects belonging to the same conceptual domain (Rakison and Oakes 2003). Therefore, this book type is an extension of the early-concept book focusing on nominal concepts. Some concept books have commonalities with picture dictionaries, in that they show several (five to seven) objects on a page with labels printed below or besides them.

Paul Stickland’s A Child’s Book of Things (1990) depicts simple scenes, such as eating breakfast in the kitchen, gardening, or bathing, and combines them with single items from these scenes represented on the opposite page. Stickland’s picturebook engages the child in two activities: first, to name and to describe the things and actions shown in the scene; and second, to search for the single items displayed on the opposite page. The child is thus prepared to focus on a complex image that connects objects belonging to one or two conceptual domain(s). This procedure marks a transition to the more sophisticated “descriptive frames”, which still belong to the category of conceptual domains.

Picturebooks focusing on “scripts” are distinguished by intricate pictures showing crowds of people and objects that are all in the same location or setting, such as a farmyard, a building yard, or a train station. In addition, these picturebooks contain texts that describe the illustrations by stressing the main events in the image. Hence, this book type supports the ability to categorize – that is, the mapping of conceptual domains to a “frame” – and also introduces linguistic features that prepare the child for an understanding of a narrative (Jones 1996). These features concern coordination, subjunction, and anaphor. This book type is connected with the aforementioned concept books and picturebooks focusing on frames: each double spread can be looked at on its own, since its text is never related to the preceding or subsequent pages. Nevertheless, the overarching frame links the images together and builds up a sequence of images. Thus, two reading strategies are interconnected: while the sequence of images entices the viewer into examining the book from the beginning to the end, the accompanying text usually refrains from this strategy, stimulating the viewer to concentrate on the respective double spread.

The communicative situation is quite different in the case of those picturebooks that focus on “narrative scripts”, such as birthday celebrations, shopping tours, train rides, or doctors’ visits. This book type also stresses the importance of conceptual domains, but the text–picture relationship is more complex. Joint reading of picturebooks with a narrative script reveals that this book type c...