Emergent Literacy: Children's Books from 0 to 3 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Emergent Literacy: Children's Books from 0 to 3 Glenna Sloan (bio) Emergent Literacy: Children's Books from 0 to 3. Edited by Bettina Kummerling-Meibauer. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2011. Writing to the New York Times in response to an article published on 8 October 2010, Shelly Harwayne, former teacher, principal, and school superintendent, pointedly includes a quotation from a universally beloved picture book: "Your article about the decline of picture book reading made me have a 'terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.'" Others, equally appalled—among them writers, psychologists, literacy experts, parents, and grandparents—joined her in commenting on what they considered a scary story. In the article, "Picture Books, Long a Staple, Lose Out in the Rush to Read," publishers claimed that picture books, holding limited value for children, were no longer in wide demand. Quoted in the piece were parents who, perhaps already anticipating the stiff competition for acceptance into the best colleges, were eager to have their toddlers read pages thick with text and so had turned to chapter books. "Parents are saying, 'My kid doesn't need books with pictures,'" declared the publisher of Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers. The vast majority of those writing letters to the editor in response to this article were lay people of all ages and backgrounds, not experts in literacy development. Yet they spoke passionately in defense of the picture book's worth. One letter writer argued, "Rushing our children into chapter books is like teaching multiplication before our kids know how to count. Bring back those picture books, and our children will not only learn to read but also love to read." Another wrote, "'Reading' illustrations is a fine art learned by ample exposure. It is critical for developing a complex sense of wonder, and an understanding of multiple meaning and irony, as well as perceiving messages of line, color, time and space." [End Page 507] While personal experience and common sense may be sufficient to convince some parents and caregivers that early pleasurable experiences with picture books positively affect the development of a young child's intellect, language, and artistic sense, today's educational policies and practices are seldom based on hunches, but on scholarly research. Emergent Literacy: Children's Books from 0 to 3 provides a model for research into the value of picture books. The editor points out that this volume "constitutes the first serious, sustained examination of the study of children's books for children ages from 0 to 3 with contributions by scholars working in different domains and attempting to assess the recognition of the role and influence of children's literature on the cognitive, linguistic, and aesthetic development of young children" (9). Each of the thirteen chapters in this scholarly collection is a revised version of a paper presented at an international conference held at the Picturebook Museum "Burg Wissem," in Troisdorf near Cologne, Germany, in March 2009. The papers are organized into three parts. In part one, chapter two, "The Dragon in the Cave: Textual representations of fictional and everyday events by children under three," considers in detail "a micro, multimodal analysis of ways in which the child recognizes and acknowledges distinct generic forms and textual structures in her mark-making" (17). Chapter three, "Color perception in infants and young children," is a thorough, informative, but succinct discussion of its title. Chapter four considers basic designs in picture books and modern art, and how experience with these provides "a productive foundation for learning abstract principles [which] can make an essential contribution to the understanding of writing and other codification" (72). The six chapters of part two examine a range of picture books intended for young children, including early concept books, simple alphabet books, and books that introduce children to cultural norms. As the editor points out in her introduction, "Aspects covered in this section include the use of visual and verbal metaphors in picturebooks for young children, the cognitive challenges of concept acquisition in relation to language acquisition, visual literacy and literary literacy and the consideration of the aesthetic qualities of picturebooks targeted at this age group" (10). Part three, "Child-book Interactions: Case Studies...