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The authors compared the discourse of 100 Israeli preschool teachers with a group of children during three book-sharing contexts: reading, reconstruction, and telling. During telling and reconstruction, the teachers used more utterances and questions and referred more to concept of book and to the illustrations. During reading, they referred more to vocabulary than during the other two contexts. Beyond these differences, the teachers showed a book-sharing style. The results highlight the unique contribution of different book contexts to the nature of teachers' discourse and the importance of training teachers to present books to children in a variety of ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual narratives, including graphic novels, illustrated instructions, and picture books, convey event sequences constituting a plot but cannot depictallevents that make up the plot. Viewers must generate inferences that fill the gaps between explicitly shown images. This study explored the inferential products and memory implications of processing gaps in visual narratives. Participants viewed picture-stories containing event sequences comprised of beginning, bridging, and end states and the presence of these event state panels was systematically manipulated. The pattern of processing times after omitted event panels suggests that participants inferred missing beginning and bridging states but not missing end states. In a recognition test including both seen and unseen event panels, participants' memories were most accurate for end state events. The results suggest that generating inferences distorts memory for explicit content, particularly content that has a high semantic overlap with potentially constructed inferences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reports on the results of an exploratory study that employed the concurrent think-aloud method to investigate narrative text-creating strategies of multilingual Transylvanian–Hungarians in English, their third language. The study explored the participants’ reliance on their different languages as they composed a story in English based on a series of wordless pictures. The study gave special attention to the role of the participants’ language of education in the composition process. It also looked at the mental processes for creating content in their third language. Study participants were Hungarian–Romanian bilingual students at two Transylvanian schools whose language of education was Romanian at one and Hungarian at the other. Study findings appear to suggest that the languages used by multilinguals have distinct roles in the process of tackling a composition task in a third-language text. While composing the target language text, study participants used their first language mostly for task identification and self-regulation, and employed their second language, Romanian, mainly as linguistic assistance in the process of creating the target language content. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article present parts of a research project where the aim is to investigate six- to seven-year-old children's language use in storytelling. The children's oral texts are based on the wordless picture bookFrog, Where Are You?Which has been, and still remains, a frequent tool for collecting narratives from children. The Frog story tradition presents a strictly structured reading of the book – a reading that does not fully match the readings of the children. Inspired by Umberto Eco's concept ofthe model reader, I explore the interplay between, on the one hand, the pictures as they appear through a picture-semiotic analysis, and on the other, the empirical readers' narratives and their cultural backgrounds. The main findings are that the Frog story-tradition, in its focus on structure, does not offer a basis for evaluation of the children's narrative language that gives full credit to the children's practices as narrators and language users. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Wordless (or nearly wordless) picturebooks are intriguing in terms of how readers make meaning from them. This article offers a conceptualization of existing studies in the field of education that use wordless picturebooks with young readers. While some of these studies contribute to understanding meaning-making, the pragmatic use of wordless picturebooks often does not take account of their particular nature and of the heightened role of the reader, leading to a mismatch between what the picturebook expects from the implied reader and the researchers’ expectations of what ‘real’ readers must do with these books. By highlighting observations from children’s literature scholarship and reader-response studies, this article aims to encourage a more interdisciplinary understanding of meaning-making. It also seeks to persuade educational researchers and mediators to consider investigative approaches that are not based on verbalization but are more in tune with the invitations that wordless picturebooks extend to young readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated 2 curriculum-based measurement tasks for writing with 170 students in 2nd and 3rd grade. The 2 tasks, Story Starter and Picture Story, varied on topical support. Both tasks used production and accuracy scores, and we developed a qualitative score for Picture Story. All production and accuracy scores and the qualitative score demonstrated low to moderate validity coefficients with the Woodcock–Johnson Test of Achievement Writing Samples subtest and a teacher rating of overall writing ability. All scores were sensitive to grade-level differences in performance, with 3rd-grade students performing higher than 2nd-grade students. Two scores for Picture Story were sensitive to growth only for 3rd-grade students, and 5 scores were sensitive to bimonthly growth for both grade levels. There was moderate classification accuracy for both tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A poetic analysis into interior space, a subjective account of how bedtime stories passed on to me from my father inform my most central route into narrative. How my subsequent journeys combine within the geography of the gallery to produce the psychic space that is A Story Told. My analysis revolves around my latest piece A Story Told a film installation written, directed and performed by the author first shown in The Millais gallery in 2004. The narrative I attempt to elucidate is a pulsing traversing from the space of exhibition to the embodiment of the viewer to the subjective demarcations of making. This nominal movement along a revolving trajectory implies a constant return, an orientation that turns back under dark, Freud's first organism, Plato's cave; the fictive journey that is central to assemblages of self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports an investigation of children's picture storybooks about school. Previous research has indicated that parents and educators choose to read books about school to children as a way of helping children become familiar with school expectations. Drawing on over 100 children's picture storybooks, the content (text and illustrations) of these books has been analysed according to categories established through the Starting School Research Project, enabling a comparison of the issues raised by children and the issues addressed in picture storybooks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the use of picture story books to broaden young students' social consciousness. Characteristics of picture study books; Titles of picture story books that help improve reading, communication and writing skills; Picture story books with provocative sociological content.

From the theoretical framework of cognitive anthropology based on the work of Charles Frake, this study explored children's classification systems underlying their interactions with illustrated picture storybooks in a classroom context. As a classroom participant-observer, the researcher carried out a classification task where children in a culturally diverse first-grade classroom sorted 15 picture books into piles of books having similar characteristics. It was found that the children classified books by topic, genre, author, culture, emotional response, and physical property of the book. The children's responses were placed in the context of the classroom setting. Some aspects of the children's classification systems were found to be similar to the teacher's way of categorizing books in the classroom library and also her way of classifying books in a book sorting activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looks into the visual storying on the mapping narrative at the church of San Marco in Venice, Italy. Interpretation of the images; Exploration of pictorial narrative of the imagery; Language of picturing and mapping.

The construction of coherent narrations of events in a picture storybook by children was studied. A causal network discourse analysis (Trabasso, van den Brock,& Suh, 1989) was applied to the narrations by children, 3, 4, 5, and 9 years in age, and adults, 20 years and older. The analysis was successfully applied at the clausal level by deriving interacting causal network representations for the perspective of each character in each of the narrations. The structure and content of the network representation of the main character were analyzed in detail. The analysis indicated that 9-year-olds and adults narrate according to a hierarchical goal plan of action. It also showed striking developmental differences from age 3 to 5. The 3-year-old children described states and neutral outcomes that are unrelated to the central theme. The 4-year-olds, in contrast, encoded actions relevant to the central theme but omitted goals and purposes. The 5-year-olds added these purposes to attempts. Coherence in the narration is achieved by applying naive theories of psychological and physical causation, reflecting knowledge about goal plans of action. The narration's content and structure are organized according to a hierarchical set of goals and a sustained plan of action. Unexpected obstacles and failures of goal attainment lead to the reinstatement of goals in order to continue following the plan. Although comprehension of this structure is attained by age 4, coherence begins to manifest itself most explicitly in the narrations of the 5-year-olds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the dichotomy of photography and comic strips. One reason why comic strips have not explored photography to a great degree is because cartoons have enjoyed continued popularity. Cartoonists which have tried using the photograph as a source of information from which to make drawings for comic strips have found the stiffness and lack of emotional information as opposed to literal information difficult to deal with. However, others are willing to try narrative photography into their medium.