Reading the Visual in Children’s Picture Books
Reading Visual Narratives: Image Analysis of Children’s Picture Books - Image Analysis of Children's Picture Books - Clare Painter
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).
Description
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