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This article offers examples of K--6 classroom texts as vehicles for teaching the Black Historical Consciousness principles as encouragement for teaching Black histories long beyond Black History Month. The framework for Black Historical Consciousness (BHC), which outlines eight principles that provide support for teaching through Black lives and livelihoods (rather than about them), in even the earliest grades include: (1) Power and Oppression; (2) Black Agency, Resistance, and Perseverance; (3) Africa and the African Diaspora; (4) Black Joy and Emotionality; (5) Black Identities; (6) Black Historical Contention; (7) Black Community, Local, and Social Histories; and (8) Black Futurism.

Purpose: Affect is central to the process of teaching and learning. The recent affective turn in literacy education has further underscored its critical potential as an act of resistance against dehumanizing forces that impact students' schooling and life experiences (Dutro, 2019; Leander and Ehret, 2019). This article, taking up the notion of affect as relational and performed forces that emerge from the in-betweenness among people, objects and material and discursive contexts, examines how two US Latinx teachers and their young bilingual students co-constructed affect and play in translanguaging read-alouds with a bilingual text that centered their culturally rooted ways of knowing and being. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on data from a larger practitioner research study that aimed at developing teacher candidates' culturally and linguistically sustaining literacy instruction, the authors took a discourse analytic approach to examine how the two teachers created curricular opportunities for affect and play in designing the translanguaging read-alouds and how bilingual children and their teachers playfully engaged with the bilingual text during the read-alouds. Findings: The analysis indicated that the teachers' intentional selection of the Spanish-English bilingual picturebook "Niño Wrestles the World" created opportunities for the children to leverage their full linguistic repertoire and funds of knowledge to engage with the text. During the read-alouds, the children and the teachers co-constructed affect and playfulness through embodied performance and translanguaging. Originality/value: This study contributes to the research and practice of literacy instruction of bilingual children by illustrating how affect figures into the process of literacy instruction and how translanguaging read-alouds can afford bilingual children opportunities to playfully engage with the text that centers their cultural epistemologies.

Learning History in upper primary requires the development of at least two key skills: historical perspective and historical empathy. Picture books might offer one approach to supporting the development of these skills with these children. Informational Picture Books (IPB) indicate positive results linking the use of the IPB with improved critical literacies. Analysis of the multimodal dynamics of the IPB reveals the necessity for students to be visually literate to realise the history learning potential of this resource. Recommendations developed from this review include requests by teachers for clarification of the Australian History curriculum and improved access to relevant IPB history resources. Professional development in teaching visual literacy may be required. Robust student historical literacies are more likely to develop from a carefully curated collection of resources which endeavour to provide a balanced view of the historical content.

While the association between shared book reading (SBR) and child language development is well documented, there has been less focus on how book characteristics may differentially elicit parents' language input and hence differentially relate to children's language skills during this activity. Moreover, despite the positive and unique role that fathers have been shown to play for children's language, the father-child SBR evidence base is small. Accordingly, the present study examined variation in father and child language quantity, quality, complexity, and function during SBR with text-based and wordless picture books and explored associations between fathers' language and children's language during these episodes. Participants were 46 father-child dyads (20 females). Fathers' mean age was 38.74 years (SD = 5.74), and children's mean age was 37.89 months (SD = 2.71). Findings indicate that fathers in the text-book condition produced significantly greater language quality, extended the topic more, and produced more conversational utterances but described and labeled pictures less than fathers in the wordless picture book condition. Fathers' language during both SBR episodes showed differential links with child's language and may suggest that fathers were fine-tuning their language in accordance with their child's language skills (effect sizes ranged from r = 0.45 to r = 0.78). It is possible that variation in book content may encourage different types of learning with distinct effects on different domains of child language. Should future research replicate such differential relations, findings may inform caretakers and early childhood interventions with the aim of promoting children's books tailored to specific language areas of interest.

This article contains a representative listing of fictional children's literature titles, which relate to selected geographic concepts. Texts in the picture books were examined based on their geographical concepts. Within the scope of the research, 82 picture storybooks selected through the criterion sampling method were analyzed via content analysis. Expressions devoted to location, place, interaction between human and environment, action and region themes were identified in the analyzed picture books. While statements regarding physical characteristics of at most one place seem to exist in the abovementioned expressions, these statements were determined to emphasize biodiversity the most. On the other hand, expressions about the region theme were seen to be the least in the picture books. Based on the obtained results, fulfilling the need for picture books including different geographical concepts was recommended.

Increasingly, New Zealand English and Te Reo Maori are being woven together in Aotearoa New Zealand. This weaving is evident in the text of many dual language picturebooks. While the combination of text and image in picturebooks creates a powerful pedagogical tool, there is little research exploring their use with tertiary Arts students. In this article, we explore how dual language picturebooks were used in a tertiary Arts class to introduce language contact concepts. The responses of a tertiary educator and students to this pedagogy are analysed and discussed, confirming the value of this pedagogical approach.

The article highlights connections between music and movement activities and emergent literacy development among infants and toddlers. I review how music is linked to phonological awareness, oral language, vocabulary, and other related skills that support reading, like executive function. I also highlight the benefits of including teacher-facilitated, hands-on, active music experiences, even when teachers may lack confidence in their musical abilities and music training. The article provides teachers with easy-to-implement activities to use in the classroom to explicitly support literacy through developmentally appropriate and engaging music and movement activities, including songs, instruments, movement, and song-based picture books.

The authors show how elementary-school age students and teachers can use picture books, young adult literature, and poetry to uncover and explore the hidden histories and untold stories of Elizabeth Jennings, Ida B. Wells, Jackie Robinson, Sarah Keys Evans, and Claudette Colvin, among others, and their protests for African Americans' right to ride in trains, streetcars, buses, and other forms of public transportation.

The current study aimed to explore the effects of interactive read-aloud with children's picture books on third-grade elementary school students' financial literacy attitude and behavior. A pretest-posttest control group quasi-experimental research design was employed. The sample of the current research consisted of 46 third-grade elementary school students. We randomly assigned two preexisting third-grade elementary school classrooms to the treatment and control groups that appeared similar considering the pretest scores of the groups. While interactive read-aloud was used in the treatment group, just reading read-aloud activities occurred in the control group. The implementation process took four weeks. Before and after the implementation, the measurement tool was administered to the students in the groups. A one-way analysis of covariance was used for the posttest scores of the students in the groups. The analysis revealed that there was a statistically significant difference in favor of the treatment group.

This study analyzed how disabilities were portrayed in picturebooks with the Américas Book Award to address the intersectionality of LatinX racial identity and disabilities. The pool of 41 picturebooks recognized by the Américas Book from 1993 to 2020 was used as the data for our systematic content analysis. Then 22 picturebooks developmentally appropriate for PreK-2nd Grade children were selected from this pool. Then six picturebooks were further analyzed as they portrayed characters with any disabilities. Only three characters whose presence impacted the story were identified to have a disability. The characters with disabilities and the types of disabilities were represented disproportionately in the books compared to the general PreK-2 population with disabilities in the United States. Four characters exhibited an orthopedic impairment, one was with emotional disturbance, and one was with a visual impairment. More materials that mirror LatinX children characters with disabilities are needed in the U.S.

Research Findings: Shared-picture book reading can stimulate children's mathematical development. Evidence of learning-supportive characteristics in picture books is limited in this domain. A first step is systematically analyzing the occurrence of domain-specific features in publicly available picture books. We analyzed the occurrence of general book features, features of numbers and quantitative language, and features of sets in 100 mathematical and 45 matched non-mathematical picture books written in Dutch. The results indicated variety among picture books, but more than 50% of the mathematical picture books focused on the 1-10 number range and ascending counting, and less than 20% paid attention to the counting principles and other numeracy skills. Quantitative language was included in 75% of the mathematical picture books, but infrequently across pages and with little variety in wording. Mathematical picture books with a story hardly differed from picture books without a story regarding the presence of domain-specific features. Finally, fewer non-mathematical picture books included mathematical content and generally on less pages compared to mathematical picture books. Practice or Policy: These findings stress the importance for picture book developers and teachers and parents to, respectively, design and select picture books in view of literature regarding children's mathematical development.

When teaching multilingual learners, it is critical for teachers to use instructional strategies that engage and nurture language and biliteracy skills. In this practice-based paper, we address how teachers can utilize translanguaging strategies to recognize and build multilingual practices while offering all learners opportunities to share their voices. The use of instructional practices that mirror the linguistic practices of multilingual learners promotes social justice and inclusivity in learning. We provide explanations and examples of translanguaging pedagogies, followed by instructional approaches that teachers can use to foster the language and literacy development of multilingual learners. Specific strategies and pedagogies that can be easily integrated into the classroom to promote language and literacy development are described. The appendix includes a shortlist of high-quality websites that support multilingual instruction and additional suggested readings for teachers seeking more information about how to integrate translanguaging into their classrooms.

In this column, we demonstrate ways to connect four commonly taught poetic genres to better explore the intersectionalities ("The University of Chicago Legal Forum";140:139-167, 1989; "Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment," 1990) in the texts and students' own lives through two cultural insider-created ("A map into the world," 2019; "Wishes," 2021) Southeast Asian (SEA) children's picturebooks about the refugee experience. In doing so, we show how students can write poetry as maps and wishes with picturebooks about the maps and wishes in the lives of SEA refugees.

Providing students encounters with diverse books is an important endeavor, and Langston Hughes themed picture books can serve as one avenue for successfully incorporating diverse literature into elementary literacy instruction. Using the methods of qualitative content analysis (Schreier, 2014) this study investigates the ways in which Langston Hughes and his literature have been incorporated into children's picture books and outlines the potential benefits of using these themed texts with elementary students. The findings of this research present specific literary texts for teachers to incorporate into their classrooms and discusses the unique opportunities these picture books can provide young readers and writers.

Research framed by evolving sociocultural theories have been fundamental in advancing the study of early childhood literacies. More recently the field has been enriched by posthumanist theories that have shifted the analytic gaze from children's participation in literacy practices and events, to the fluid relationality of literacies. Concurrently, neo-Vygotskian scholars have advanced cultural-historical concepts to study a child and their environment in unity. This paper brings neo-Vygotskian thinking into dialogue with 'more-than-human' literacies in early childhood. Drawing on vignettes generated from an ethnography involving 3-4-year-old children, the paper explores the in-between-ness of young children and the socio-material environment during encounters with text, to seek insights into the emerging idiosyncratic, subjectively, and relationally produced experiences. From this conceptual space, the paper considers the ways in which children's intention and orientation emerge with text and how micromoments in relations can be sites of potential transformation.

The aim of the study was to investigate the effect of the environmental education programme, which was based on shared book reading, on the awareness and attitudes of preschoolers towards the environment. In the research, an experimental design with pretest-posttest control group was used. In the research, story-based environmental education programme was applied to the experiment group for ten weeks. As a result of the study, when the pre-test and post-test mean scores of the children in the experiment group who participated in the story-based environmental education practices were compared, a significant difference was found in favour of the post-test. When the experiment and control group posttest mean scores were compared, it was found that there was a significant difference in favour of the experiment group. In line with these results, it can be said that story-based environmental education practices positively affect children's environmental awareness and attitudes towards the environment.

Purpose: Bilingual children often demonstrate a high rate of disfluencies, which might impact the diagnostic evaluation of fluency disorders; however, research on the rates and types of disfluencies in bilinguals' two languages is limited. The purpose of this research is to profile disfluencies of two types, stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) and other disfluencies (ODs), in the speech of Russian-Hebrew bilingual typically developing children, focusing on cross-linguistic differences and the effect of language proficiency in both languages. Method: Spontaneous narratives based on the "Frog, Where Are You?" (Mayer, 1969) picture book were collected in both languages from 40 bilingual Russian-Hebrew children aged 5;6-6;6 (years;months). The transcribed narratives were coded for SLD (sound, syllable, and monosyllabic word repetitions) and OD (multisyllabic word/phrase repetitions, interjections, and revisions), and their frequencies per 100 syllables were calculated. Results: Overall, most children had a percentage of SLD and OD below the cutoff point and within the existing criteria for stuttering diagnosis established based on monolingual data, but several children exceeded this stuttering criterion. Monosyllabic word repetitions (part of SLD) and interjections (part of OD) were more frequent in Hebrew than in Russian. Lower proficiency was associated with a higher percentage of monosyllabic word repetitions and of interjections in both languages. Conclusions: Bilingual disfluency criteria are needed, since based on the existing monolingual criteria, some children might be erroneously assessed as children who stutter, thus leading to overdiagnosis. The results support the claim that proficiency is an important factor in the production of disfluencies.

This article focuses on 13 picturebooks by South Asian authors which the author categorizes as culturally conscious picturebooks. These books show the beauty of the lived experiences of South Asian American families. The author argues that in response to the sociopolitical realities, social studies educators can expand their curricula to weave in voices from South Asian communities.

The authors argue that with the continued marginalization of social studies in the elementary classroom, integration has become a popular and effective method for the inclusion of social studies content in the daily curriculum. Using controversial issues, they highlight a model for this integration with a focus on children's literature.

Based on the cross-channel connections between auditory and pictorial representations, it has been proposed that the presentation of coherent narration along with the picture and text content may enhance children's story comprehension and vocabulary learning. The authors tested 40 four- to five-year-old Malaysian prereaders (17 Malays, 23 Chinese) for story comprehension while observing their eye movements to determine the degree to which the presence of pictures and/or text aids understanding of the narration and influences looking patterns. Both Malay and Chinese prereaders showed no interest in the printed text that was presented alongside the picture on the same page, which is consistent with earlier findings. This suggests that ethnic origins have little influence on how prereaders direct their visual attention to the relevant information for story comprehension. When there was no narration, they fixated longer on the text and less on the image, indicating that a significant amount of mental effort was required to process the words without verbal information. Regardless of stimulus congruency, storytelling performance affected how much children focused on target objects and keywords. More intriguingly, it was found that in Malay prereaders, there was a correlation between story comprehension and vocabulary skills across tasks. Additionally, Malay prereaders who performed well looked at the displayed stimuli longer than Chinese prereaders who performed well, especially when a narrator was presented alongside the visual stimulus. These novel findings are discussed along with their implications for multimedia learning and future research directions.

Purpose: Narrative abilities are an important part of everyday conversation, playing a key role in academic settings, at home, and in social interactions. As narrative assessments are an effective method for identifying children falling below age expectations, it has been recommended they be included as a routine part of clinical language assessments. It is important that assessments meet the needs of clinicians and their practice. The current study is a practice-based research partnership, where research questions arose from a partnership with school-based speech-language pathologists (SLPs). Working together, SLPs and researchers evaluated a bespoke narrative retell assessment tool. The current study examined recall of events in two wordless picture books, in order to evaluate story equivalency and determine if the tool was appropriate for progress monitoring. These findings were then used to develop local norms. Method: Two hundred sixty-three students were recruited across 12 schools in kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2. Students completed the narrative retell task, retelling either "One Frog Too Many" or "Frog Goes to Dinner," followed by answering 10 comprehension questions related to story events. Results: A significant effect of story was found for both main and supporting events recalled, but not for total events recalled. Total events recalled were found to be predicted by grade only. An examination of percent events recalled revealed four main and four supporting events in each story that were potentially misclassified. Reanalysis following reallocation revealed no significant effect of story for main or supporting events recalled. Normative values for each grade were created using percentile ranks of total events recalled. Conclusion: Through a practice-based research partnership, researchers and clinicians worked collaboratively to evaluate a tool, adapt its use, and improve evidence-based practice in a manner that was appropriate and met the needs for the clinical context.

Text social information includes the cognitive processes and social communication skills that support real or hypothetical human thought or interaction. The current measure of text social information is genre. However, genre is a limited measure because of poor operationalization, limited specificity, and overlap with structural and linguistic differences. The purpose of this study was to develop an automated text analysis approach to measure text social information in children's picture books beyond genre. Studies 1 and 2 found convergent and divergent validity for several measures that captured text social information with these measures being significantly higher in children's fiction compared to nonfiction books and not correlated with other structural and linguistic text measures. Study 3 found two components of text social information, based on a principal component analysis. These two components captured a general socialness factor (i.e., theory of mind, emotions, and social relationships) and pragmatics/conversation. Study 4 provides preliminary evidence for the predictive validity of the text social information measures. Together, this study provides an initial set of continuous measures for measuring text social information that can begin to advance the field in determining how text social information impacts comprehension and social cognition.

Initiating conversations and responding to initiations of others via gestural and verbal means are prerequisites for participating in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) interactions. However, research to date has not addressed the multimodal initiations and responses of young second language learners (SLLs) in natural ECEC settings. This study investigated their initiations and responses during shared picture book reading interactions with ECEC practitioners with a focus on modalities, strategies, as well as the multimodal meanings and types of utterances. Participants were 30 SLLs in German ECEC institutions. Results showed that SLLs responded to the initiations of the practitioners predominantly verbally and initiated interactions mostly multimodally. Furthermore, the children produced more combinations of multi-word utterances and gestures in their initiations than in their responses. These findings complement the body of work demonstrating the varied communicative skills young SLLs use in their interactions as well as by underlining the importance of gestural cues in everyday ECEC interactions.

The aim of this research was to explore the progression of narrative macro-structure in Chinese children between the ages of 3 and 6 in preschool. To investigate the narratives of young children in a Chinese prefecture-level city kindergarten, the study selected the wordless picture book "Frog, Where Are You?" as their material. They employed the story grammar analysis method and examined the storytelling of 41 preschoolers (aged 3-4), 47 preschoolers (aged 4-5), and 66 preschoolers (aged 5-6). Significant disparities were observed among age groups in terms of both the total score for story grammar ability and the specific indicators associated with story grammar ability scores, as highlighted by the study. Notably, substantial variances were observed in the total story grammar ability score between children aged 3-4 and 4-5, between children aged 4-5 and 5-6, and between children aged 3-4 and 5-6, as evidenced by p-values of 0.000. Furthermore, substantial dissimilarities were evident in the specific indicators of story grammar ability scores, encompassing "story background, story cause, attempt, and story results," when comparing children aged 3-4 years with those aged 4-5 years (p-values of 0.001, 0.000, 0.025, and 0.008, correspondingly). Moreover, significant differences were identified between children aged 4-5 years and children aged 5-6 years (all p-values of 0.000). However, there were no significant differences in the "internal response" indicator between different age groups (p-value of 0.777 > 0.05). The study found that Chinese preschoolers' narrative macrostructure development showed extremely strong age effects, and their narrative macrostructure ability increased with age. Furthermore, the study identified that the development of narrative macrostructure in Chinese preschoolers may be related to their own cause-and-effect logical reasoning abilities.

This study aims to examine whether a maths-unrelated reading intervention can improve children's mathematical performance and to compare the effects of maths-related and maths-unrelated reading interventions. Furthermore, this study examines whether the effects of reading interventions are moderated by individual differences, including gender, pre-test maths performance and general cognitive ability. One hundred thirty-four second-grade Chinese children were recruited into three different groups. In the control group, the children received business as usual teaching, while in the two experimental groups, the children received a maths-related or maths-unrelated reading intervention. The results showed that the maths-unrelated reading intervention could significantly improve children's mathematical performance, and the beneficial effect did not differ from the maths-related intervention. Moreover, the effects of the two reading interventions were not moderated by children's individual differences. These findings support the function hypothesis of language for mathematics.

The time children spend indoors with nature-based children's literature is as important as the time they spend outdoors. Children's literature traditionally has been replete with pastoral, animal, and wilderness stories that nurture a sense of wonder and excitement about the world we share. Such literature encourages a high regard for the environment and enhances a child's capacity for empathy toward all forms of life. In this article, the author discusses how the informal, yet intact, nature curriculum found in compelling books for children helps them understand the manner in which nature sustains life itself and fosters realizations about current environmental issues that must be confronted by the global society.

Taking 22 children with mild and moderate autism as subjects and using the TobiiX 120 eye-tracker to record their eye movements in visual search of images in picture books, the characteristics of the process of autistic children viewing picture books were explored. Two measures, fixation counts and gaze duration, were used alongside attention heatmap, to explore the visual patterns among children with autism viewing two types of researcher-made picture books and an ordinary picture book. Using a within-subject design, it was found that children with autism could sustain longer gaze duration and have more fixation points on the effective area of the picture book content when viewing researcher-made picture books than when viewing the ordinary picture book, suggesting better visual attention to single-object and single-pattern picture books. The study offers insights and support for related picture book reading and teaching in the future.

This study was designed to explore elementary students' existing religious literacy about Judaism alongside how they respond to a series of lessons about Judaism that utilize a picture book text set and discussion-based teaching strategies. Participants in the study were third-grade students at a private Christian school in the South. Data was collected via recorded observations, analytic memos, field notes of the recorded observations, and student work. Results indicate that students entered the unit with little to no religious literacy about Judaism. Through participation in the lessons, students gained religious literacy about the Jewish religion, thinking critically about Judaism in relation to their own religious beliefs. They also responded in ways that indicate a humanizing connection between the students and the culture they are investigating.

In this paper, we draw upon Rosenblatt's transactional theory of reading to frame six readings of a picture book. The picture book, "There's a Ghost in This House" by Oliver Jeffers, was selected for a children's literature reading group which brought together literacy researchers and teacher educators to share their encounters with the text. The question "How did you read the book?" provoked us to examine how we had transacted with the text to generate interpretations. This work was presented at the "Stories that Matter" seminar alongside the other papers appearing in this special edition of the Australian Journal of Language and Literacy. In this paper, we highlight our own roles as readers encountering Jeffer's book and reflect on our own responses as a way of explaining the multiple readings we present. We emphasise the place of intertextuality and intratextuality in reader response and argue that Rosenblatt's transactional theory continues to be an important way of understanding what it means to read, including the reading of multimodal texts which combine linguistic, visual and material modes.

High-quality children's literature, including picturebooks, are important resources in the classroom for students to engage with complex and sometimes concerning contemporary issues. One strategy to involve students in learning about such issues is through the use of metafictive devices, which are literary stratagems that draw readers into knowing more about a topic and helping them understand and interpret them safely. In this paper, we analyse three selected texts that contain important and deliberate metafictive devices used by award-winning authors/illustrators. First, we share brief synopses of each book and then provide detailed analyses of the literary tools used by the authors, including how they support students' meaning-making practices through language and image. Then we consider how these works were used in a primary school classroom to improve children's critical multimodal literacies so that they became more discerning readers who could effectively cope and engage with complex and troubling world issues through literature.

To consider whether multimodality matters, literacy researchers and educators must first explore the theoretical foundations of social semiotics and multimodality, how these theories have evolved to address current social, cultural, and material contexts, and the implications of these theories on literacy pedagogy. In addition to conceptualizing what multimodality is, it is important to explore what multimodality does for picturebook scholars, literacy researchers, and educators. Literacy educators would benefit from a better understanding of how picturebooks work from social semiotic and multimodal perspectives, how children make sense of complex multimodal texts, and the various roles picturebooks play in the social, historical, and cultural contexts in which they are embedded.

In 2016, "Last Stop on Market Street," an American picturebook by Matt de la Pena, won the Newberry Medal, a Caldecott Honor, and a Coretta Scott King illustrator honor. In March 2021, Dr Seuss Enterprises, after working "with a panel of experts, including educators," decided to cease publishing "And to Think I Saw in on Mulberry Street" (1937) along with five other books that "portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong." Both decisions seem to have been motivated by a strong commitment to a contemporary critical multicultural perspective (Yenika-Agbaw, 2022). In this paper, I will explore another perspective through which we might assess the quality and potential impact these and other texts might have on child readers. Drawing on Peter Hollindale's (1997) contention that a children's book acts as the vehicle for a reading event during which readers form or reform their ideas of the social construction of childhood and their place within that construction, I will examine how these books portray "childness," defined by Hollindale as both a distinguishing property of a text and what a reader brings to the reading. As these texts offer snapshots of what it means to be a child in two different times and contexts, I argue that the constructions of childhood in children's books have changed significantly in the twenty-first century. I will use multimodal discourse analysis and critical content analysis to query the degree to which these texts are "childly" (a term of respect for Hollindale, as opposed to childish) by focusing on notions of the imagination, diverse representation, and adult/child relations.

Despite a large number of augmented reality (AR) picture books available on the market, their quality varies. The aim of this study is to analyse AR picture books' features, benefits and drawbacks through a review of academic literature and award-winning commercial works on the subject and to provide insight into future trends. Our approach has the potential to benefit book designers, publishers, educators and instructional designers. First, the search scope was defined, we identified 30 academic papers that met the selection criteria and classified them by type and year. Next, 12 award-winning AR picture books on the commercial market were selected and reviewed to illustrate recent advances in the application of AR technology. We concluded that future trends in AR picture books would blur virtual and physical realities more seamlessly, enhancing but not distracting audiences through real interaction.

At a time when "difference" is being actively diluted in the service of standardisation and conservative views of nationhood, stories about difference, and their semiotic and multimodal elements, provide rich grounds for critical engagement. This is especially the case with stories about highly visible cultural symbols, such as the hijab, worn in many school classrooms in countries like Australia. In this paper, we explore the use of critical analysis of multimodal elements as matters with which to think about cultural difference, through the picture book, "The Proudest Blue" - a story of Hijab and family" by Ibtihaj Muhammad with art by Hatem Aly, 2020. This story presents to young people the notion of being strong in cultural difference via the symbol of the hijab. Our analysis draws on Cappello et al.'s 2019) Critical Multimodal Literacy approach to explore four dimensions: communicating with multimodal tools; re-storying, representing and redesigning; acknowledging and shifting power relationships and leveraging multimodal resources to critique and transform socio-political realities. We identify the range of multimodal tools the author and illustrator put to use to re-story and critique common misconceptions about the wearing of the hijab as a religious symbol. Making links between multimodal composition and critical analysis is a powerful way to affirm the significance of children's literature that addresses difference, a term often conflated with diversity which references dominant norms. It can also inspire children to story their own matters in ways that critique notions of cultural homogeneity.

In this article, the authors analyze four picturebooks about adoption that highlight these experiences of liminality. Children who have been adopted may feel torn between two families and cultures. Children who are adopted must make sense of their lives and identities, residing in a state of in-between-ness. Adoption presents a time of displacement and a crossing over into something new. Critical adoption studies shifts the focus from the family formed through adoption to acknowledging the possible hardship and inequitable conditions the birthparents may experience through a trauma-informed approach. At the heart of critical adoption studies is an interrogation of the ways in which matters such as reproductive justice, choice, poverty, race, capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism all intersect to construct the complexity of adoption in which some are privileged and others marginalized. Another way critical adoption studies highlights injustice is by considering how adoption is operationalized to privilege white, heterosexual, cisgender couples who are often American and financially secure. One aspect of critical adoption studies that is especially important to consider in our study relates to the notion of kinship. The notion of kinship as a normative model of family is disrupted as an adopted child is introduced to a family, particularly when the adopted child is a different race than the adoptive parents, and thus subject to racism that the adoptive parents will not experience in the same way. At the same time, as the notion of kinship and biological belonging is disrupted, the "ideal family" is upheld, and notions of what this entails are reproduced (e.g., middle-class, Western ideals).

This article investigates how picture books published in 2019 represent Autism to children, with special attention as to whether those representations overtly include terminology around autism or covertly present autistic characters. Although both overt and covert representations occur in children's literature, covert representation may or may not come to the attention of children. Overt and covert uses of language convey different elements of personhood to readers, portraying what we, the authors, feel is important. Our analysis of these four samples of 2019 picture books was framed by critical disability studies, labelling theory and camouflage and by developmental bibliotherapy, providing evidence that the distinction between overt and covert labelling can have influences on the perceptions of readers.

Motivated by the discussion of modern and contemporary art in Dr. Seuss's (2019) "Horse Museum," the authors sought to determine if children's picture books about visiting the art museum include contemporary art. Moreover, if so, what messages about contemporary art are sent by these books? How can teachers who rely on picture books as an entry point for preparing young children for a visit to a museum use them in ways that encourage openness to and an embrace of contemporary art? To answer these questions, the authors engaged in content analysis of 17 children's picture books, revealing a general absence of contemporary art.

Educators and families frequently use children's picture books to introduce young children to unfamiliar experiences, including the start of school. In this study, we examine 52 U.S. picture books portraying the transition to kindergarten. Specifically, this content analysis explores the depiction of kindergarten teachers, including the demographic characteristics of these teachers, the extent to which these teacher characteristics mirror those of the kindergarteners in their classrooms, the ways teachers interact with kindergarteners, and the learning environments teachers create for entering kindergarteners. Results show that teachers are generally portrayed as abled and female, with White teachers depicted more frequently than teachers from any other racial or ethnic group. Our findings also indicate that many books about starting kindergarten do not depict a mix of racially diverse kindergarteners and teachers or teacher-student racial and ethnic match. Finally, we find that teachers are portrayed in narrow ways; characterized as classroom supervisors who have relatively limited engagement with children and who rarely inspire students in their intellectual pursuits. Overall results indicate a need for an expanded offering of books about starting kindergarten that are more representative of diverse kindergarten experiences, including both more teacher and student diversity as well as images of kindergarten teachers who are actively engaged in children's kindergarten transition.

The research nature of this study is to examine the priority of English as a foreign language in many non-English speaking countries in the context of globalization with a focus on the importance of English for cross-linguistic communication and interpersonal communication. The research purpose is to understand the effects of language picture books applied to interactive teaching methods on English language learning motivation, learning performance, and language and reading ability of elementary school students in southern Taiwan. The research method used herein is an experimental design model. In total, 192 students in eight classes in Grade Six of two elementary schools in southern Taiwan, each with four classes of 24 students, who used the same picture book materials are taken as the research subjects for an experimental study. The research method includes the application of language picture books to interactive teaching methods, combined with a variety of teaching activities, to create a fun and enjoyable learning atmosphere. The study observes students' active participation and learning performance in the classroom and evaluates the impacts of these activities on their learning motivation, language ability, and reading ability were evaluated. The findings of this study are as follows: 1) The use of the interactive teaching method with language picture books has a significant effect on students' motivation to learn English, by observing students' active participation in the classroom, 2) The English picture books inspire children's curiosity and interest in reading, increase their motivation for English learning, and make them quite interested in reading, 3) The course incorporated a variety of teaching activities to create a happy learning atmosphere, so that students can continue to work toward their English learning goals after the course is over. We also present the conclusions and discussions based on the results in the hope that language picture books can develop students' capacity for listening and concentration and contribute to the development and improvement of their language ability and reading ability.

The study examines the intermodality in children's picture books, with a special focus on the visual-verbal meaning instantiation in young learners' visual literacy readings. Picture books serve as one of the main platforms and channels that prepare children for early literacy education. Coronavirus as a key theme children have encountered during the COVID-19 pandemic period has been widely discussed in picture books for different educational purposes. This study employs systemic functional linguistics (SFL)-based multimodal discourse analysis and draws upon Painter, Martin, and Unsworth's (2013) visual narrative analytic framework to explore the intermodal relationships between the visual and verbal meaning systems and how each semiotic system is represented and instantiated in the picture books as bimodal texts. "Coronavirus: A book for children" (2020) and "My hero is you: How kids can fight COVID-19" (2020), the two most widely disseminated picture books on Coronavirus, were chosen for case study and comparative analysis. Through these, the intermodal meaning making process that features in children's literature is examined and synthesised from the three visual analytical perspectives of the representations, relationships, and organisations in the social semiotic construction to facilitate children's ability to read and comprehend the COVID-related visual information in integration with the verbal semiotics. The findings reveal the visual images function as visual recontextualization for the verbal realisations and provide imagistic contextualisation for the textualized storytelling.