Reading Visual Narratives: Image Analysis of Children's Picture Books, Clare Painter, JR Martin and Len Unsworth

Clare Painter [+–]

University of Sydney

Clare Painter is Honorary Associate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney.

J.R. Martin [+–]

University of Sydney

J R Martin is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. His research interests include systemic theory, functional grammar, discourse semantics, register, genre, multimodality and critical discourse analysis, focussing on English and Tagalog – with special reference to the transdisciplinary fields of educational linguistics and social semiotics.

Len Unsworth [+–]

Australian Catholic University

Len Unsworth is Professor in Education at Australian Catholic University. He has been a chief investigator on five Australian Research Council funded projects since 2005 including two ARC Linkage Projects with the NSW Department of Education and Training and the Australian Children’s Television Foundation as industry partners. Len’s publications include Literacy Learning and Teaching (Macmillan, 1993), Researching Language in Schools and Communities (Continuum, 2000), Teaching Multiliteracies across the Curriculum [with Angela Thomas, Alyson Simpson and Jenny Asha] (Open University Press, 2001), Teaching Children’s Literature with Information and Communication Technologies (McGraw-Hill/Open University Press 2005), E-literature for Children and Classroom Literacy Learning (Routledge, 2006), New Literacies and the English Curriculum (Continuum, 2008) and Multimodal Semiotics (Continuum, 2008).

PAPERBACK PUBLISHED APRIL 2014

Contemporary children’s picture books provide a rich domain for developing theory and analysis of visual meaning and its relation to accompanying verbal text. This book offers new descriptions of the visual strand of meaning in picture book narratives as a way of furthering the project of ‘multimodal’ discourse analysis and of explaining the literacy demands and apprenticing techniques of children’s earliest literature.

Reading Visual Narratives uses the principles of systemic-functional theory to organise an explicit account of visual meaning in relation to three perspectives: the visual construction of the narrative events and characters (ideational meaning), the visual positioning of the reader through choices related to focalisation and appraisal (interpersonal meaning) and the discourse organization of visual meanings through choices in framing and composition (textual meaning). The descriptions throughout are illustrated with examples from highly regarded children’s picture books.

Reading Visual Narratives extends previous social-semiotic accounts of the ‘grammar’ of the image, by focussing attention on discourse level meanings and on semantic relationships created by sequences of images. At the same time, it extends current understandings of how picture books work through its explicit and systematic account of the visual meanings and their integration with verbal aspects of the texts.

It will be of interest to researchers in multimodal discourse analysis, systemic-functional theory, and children’s literature and literacy.

Series: Functional Linguistics

Prelims

Preface [+–] ix-x

Clare Painter,J.R. Martin,Len Unsworth

University of Sydney

Clare Painter is Honorary Associate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney.

University of Sydney

Australian Catholic University

PAPERBACK PUBLISHED APRIL 2014 Contemporary children’s picture books provide a rich domain for developing theory and analysis of visual meaning and its relation to accompanying verbal text. This book offers new descriptions of the visual strand of meaning in picture book narratives as a way of furthering the project of ‘multimodal’ discourse analysis and of explaining the literacy demands and apprenticing techniques of children’s earliest literature. Reading Visual Narratives uses the principles of systemic-functional theory to organise an explicit account of visual meaning in relation to three perspectives: the visual construction of the narrative events and characters (ideational meaning), the visual positioning of the reader through choices related to focalisation and appraisal (interpersonal meaning) and the discourse organization of visual meanings through choices in framing and composition (textual meaning). The descriptions throughout are illustrated with examples from highly regarded children’s picture books. Reading Visual Narratives extends previous social-semiotic accounts of the ‘grammar’ of the image, by focussing attention on discourse level meanings and on semantic relationships created by sequences of images. At the same time, it extends current understandings of how picture books work through its explicit and systematic account of the visual meanings and their integration with verbal aspects of the texts. It will be of interest to researchers in multimodal discourse analysis, systemic-functional theory, and children’s literature and literacy. Preface to the book.

Acknowledgements [+–] xi

Clare Painter,J.R. Martin,Len Unsworth

University of Sydney

Clare Painter is Honorary Associate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney.

University of Sydney

Australian Catholic University

Acknowledgments

Reading the Visual in Children’s Picture Books [+–] 1-13

Clare Painter,J.R. Martin,Len Unsworth

University of Sydney

Clare Painter is Honorary Associate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney.

University of Sydney

Australian Catholic University

This chapter will briefly consider the literature on the picture book as a complex bimodal text before outlining the social semiotic model of SFL that provides the framework for the following three chapters. Each of these elaborates on one area of visual meaning and illustrates how it functions, with examples drawn from highly regarded picture book stories. The final chapter will look at correspondences and complementarities between the visual and verbal semiotics and suggest a framework for analysing a picture book as a visual–verbal unity. Topics include: 1.1 Picture books as a site for multimodal discourse analysis; 1.2 The picture book and its criticism; 1.3 Using systemic functional theory; 1.4 The current study

Enacting Social Relations [+–] 15-52

Clare Painter,J.R. Martin,Len Unsworth

University of Sydney

Clare Painter is Honorary Associate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney.

University of Sydney

Australian Catholic University

This chapter will focus on five further systems relevant to interpersonal meaning: those of focalisation, affect, pathos, ambience and graduation. ocalisation is a reinterpretation and elaboration of Kress and van Leeuwen’s system of contact, and, like affect and pathos, it is very much concerned with the depiction of characters in the stories. ambience, in part a reinterpretation of Kress and van Leeuwen’s system of modality, is primarily concerned with the depiction of settings and the use of colour to create a mood. graduation is a term borrowed from SFL work on appraisal (Martin and White, 2005) to refer to strategies for intensifying gradable interpersonal meanings. Topics include: 2.1 Interpersonal meaning; 2.2 focalisation; 2.3 pathos and affect; 2.4 ambience; 2.5 graduation; 2.6 Visual interpersonal meaning in The Tinpot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman

Construing Representations [+–] 53-89

Clare Painter,J.R. Martin,Len Unsworth

University of Sydney

Clare Painter is Honorary Associate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney.

University of Sydney

Australian Catholic University

This chapter will consider picture book images in terms three categories of namely – participants, processes and circumstances – with most attention paid to aspects of their representation in a narrative sequence. Topics include: 3.1 Ideational meaning; 3.2 Participants; 3.3 Processes; 3.4 Circumstances; 3.5 Visual ideational meaning in Lucy’s Bay

Composing Visual Space [+–] 91-132

Clare Painter,J.R. Martin,Len Unsworth

University of Sydney

Clare Painter is Honorary Associate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney.

University of Sydney

Australian Catholic University

Very young pre-literate children sometimes surprise us by attending to a minor element in a picture book image rather than ‘the main event’, or may appear to enjoy one image or page without regard to its place as part of a continuous story. This suggests that part of the pedagogic work of a good picture book is to help train the child’s attention and organise the meanings within the page, as well as to provide links between sequential images to help construct the rhythm and shape of the story. These are matters relevant to the textual metafunction, which is concerned with integrating ideational and interpersonal meanings, packaging them within textual units, and linking them across units to create an organised and coherent whole. Topics include: 4.1 Textual meaning; 4.2 intermodal integration; 4.3 framing; 4.4 focus; 4.5 Visual textual meaning in Possum Magic

Intermodality: Image and Verbiage [+–] 133-172

Clare Painter,J.R. Martin,Len Unsworth

University of Sydney

Clare Painter is Honorary Associate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney.

University of Sydney

Australian Catholic University

This chapter will sketch out the way image analysis can be implemented alongside linguistic analysis to bring out the interplay between the two semiotic systems in examples of bimodal stories. To do this we will draw on the descriptions of visual meaning systems described in earlier chapters and the descriptions of linguistic meaning systems provided in Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) and Martin and Rose (2007). Topics include: 5.1 Instantiation of meaning; 5.2 Visual–verbal instantiation in Way Home; 5.3 Coda

End Matter

References [+–] 173-181

Clare Painter,J.R. Martin,Len Unsworth

University of Sydney

Clare Painter is Honorary Associate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney.

University of Sydney

Australian Catholic University

Index [+–] 183-186

Clare Painter,J.R. Martin,Len Unsworth

University of Sydney

Clare Painter is Honorary Associate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney.

University of Sydney

Australian Catholic University

Reviews

…the authors have achieved their goal to contribute to existing descriptions of visual meaning as well as to intermodality. This book should be of particular interest to those looking to diversify their work with images in educational contexts, since it offers theoretically sound networks and frameworks to inform analysis at varying levels.
Discourse Studies, 16.6 (2014)

Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty, professionals, and practitioners.
Choice, Vol 50.11

Overall, Reading Visual Narratives is an important contribution to the field of social semiotics, in general, and to the study of visual-verbal narratives in children’s picture books, in particular. Painter et al. have produced a work that is (almost) as fascinating as the material upon which it is based.
LinguistList, June 2013

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Books and Journals in Humanities, Social Science and Performing Arts

Reading Visual Narratives

Image Analysis of Children's Picture Books

Clare Painter [+–]

University of Sydney

J.R. Martin [+–]

University of Sydney

Len Unsworth [+–]

Australian Catholic University

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