Krstevska, Nade (2020) Ways of Reading and Thinking: Analysing Young Readers' Response to the Relationship Between Text and Illustrations in Children's Picture Books. PhD thesis, Victoria University.

Abstract

There are many ways of reading and interpreting the relationship between text and illustrations, both in literary and everyday contexts. These ways vary based on who the reader is and what is the purpose of their reading. In this study the reader is the child, and the purpose of the study is to examine the child’s cognitive, semiotic, and poetic engagement with six different text-picture relationships using the theoretical frameworks of cognitive, semiotic, and poetic theory. More specifically cognitive theory depicts how the child engages with the cognitive processes in Lorin W. Anderson and David R. Krathwohl’s (2001) Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain, consisting of memory, comprehension, application, analysis, evaluation, and creation. Semiotic theory reveals how the child communicates their understanding of a text through a signifying system of communicative behaviour consisting of visual, verbal, physical, oral, or synthesized exchanges. And poetic theory depicts the child’s use of the visual elements in a text such as line, shape, colour, texture, and the verbal elements such as figurative language, sound techniques, structure, irony, and register. Together these theoretical frameworks depict the vast opportunities that picture books provide children for cognitive, semiotic, and poetic engagement. These opportunities are more extensively outlined in a report addressed to participating schools in the study. The report includes several recommendations that expand upon a teacher’s professional practice, while simultaneously improving children’s learning outcomes through suggested education and pedagogy. In doing so the study makes a valuable text-picture relationships inherent in children’s picture books through the exploration of the visual and verbal signs in them which are part of a signifying system of communicative behaviour.

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