1st Edition
Learning from Picturebooks Perspectives from child development and literacy studies
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:
- language acquisition
- the child’s cognitive development
- emotional development
- literary acquisition ("literary literacy")
- 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.
Understanding Learning from Picturebooks: an Introduction Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Jörg Meibauer, Kerstin Nachtigäller, and Katharina Rohlfing Part 1: Symbol-based Learning in Picturebooks Picturebooks and Early Literacy. How Do Picturebooks Support Early Conceptual and Narrative Development? Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Jörg Meibauer An Examination of Factors that Affect Young Children’s Learning and Transfer from Picturebooks Patricia A. Ganea and Catlin F. Canfield What the Child Can Learn from Simple Descriptive Picturebooks. An Inquiry into Lastwagen/Trucks by Paul Stickland Jörg Meibauer The Development of Color Vision and of the Ability to Appreciate Color in Picturebooks Mei Ying Boon and Stephen J. Dain Part 2: Co-constructed Learning from Picturebooks Gesturing in Joint Book Reading Katharina J. Rohlfing, Angela Grimminger and Kerstin Nachtigäller Growing Vocabulary in the Context of Shared Book Reading Pamela Blewitt The Role of Distributed Cognition in Early Explorations of Symbolic Expression Lesley Lancaster and Rose Flewitt Affective Interaction During Classroom Picturebook Reading Eleni Moschovaki and Sara Meadows Part 3: Learning Language Skills from Picturebooks Word Learning via Shared Storybook Reading Jessica S. Horst What Good is a Picturebook? Developing Children’s Oral Language and Literacy Through Shared Picturebook Reading Elaine Reese Tense Acquisition with Picturebooks Linda Stark
Biography
Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer is Professor in the German Department at the University of Tübingen, Germany.
Jörg Meibauer is Chair for German Linguistics at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany.
Kerstin Nachtigäller is a member of the Emergentist Semantics Group at the Center of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology, Bielefeld University, Germany.
Katharina J. Rohlfing is Head of the Emergentist Semantics Group at the Center of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology, Bielefeld University, Germany.
"With chapter contributors coming from fields such as developmental psychology, optometry and vision science, early-years education, clinical linguistics, international children’s literature, multimodal literacy, linguistics, philosophy, and preschool education – this scholarly work is a compendium of interdisciplinary approaches which looks into how children acquire language as well as develop cognitive, emotional, and emergent literacy skills through picturebooks… The editors have done a remarkable job of structuring each chapter in such a way that the core connecting thread of how children learn from picturebooks runs through this academic text that features empirical investigations conducted or reviewed extensively but hay chapter contributors." — Rhoda Myra Garces-Bascal, Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature
