Emergent reading comprehension: Social imagination and kindergarteners’ readings of a wordless picture book

Abstract

In this cross-case analysis of six young children’s wordless book readings, we examine the ways in which participants use social understanding during the reading of a wordless book to understand the narrative story. Using a conceptually based coding scheme, we identified places in children’s readings in which they imagined the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of characters. We refer to this use of social understanding during reading as social imagination, as it is occurs not in an actual but in a vicarious context. The findings indicated that children who frequently engaged in imagining the minds of others produced more as well as more varied meaning units and often ‘became’ the characters during their wordless book reading. Multimodal analysis of video data show that children who used social imagination relatively more frequently had livelier readings, with extensive use of inflection, emotion, and voicing of characters as well as a sense of continual investment in the narrative event as it unfolded. The use of social imagination appears to be critical in making sense of a story. The cases presented here demonstrate how understanding the minds of others leads to more complex thinking during the reader-text transaction. Implications for classroom practice and research are discussed.