Picture Books Research Articles

Perspectives on Practice: Peritextual Features and Racialized Space in Children’s Literature

This article focuses on Ezra Jack Keats’s books and the ways these books enhance the literary experience through the richness of the peritextual features. Keats’s picture books have the potential to assist with comprehension building while providing a glimpse inside complex racialized spaces over a span of years.

Research and Policy: Becoming Relentless Interrogators: A Critical Stance toward Children’s Literature

In this Research and Policy column, the authors define what it means for teachers and students to take a critical stance when reading children’s literature. They offer a framework teachers can use to enact a critical stance when reading picture books with their students and provide suggestions for how teachers might teach students about the world using children’s literature as a tool.

Her Fierce Faith: Contextualizing Ellen Tarry as a Catholic Convert and Foremother of Black Lives Matter Activism

Abstract: This article contextualizes the timely significance of Ellen Tarry as an African American teacher, writer, activist, and Catholic convert who engaged in interracial justice before, during, and after the Civil Rights Movement. It similarly presents her as a foremother of present-day Black Lives Matter (BLM) activism. Locating her divergences from other Black writers across time, this analysis features the distinctive admixture of secular and sacred values pervading her writings and work as a Harlem Renaissance journalist, autobiographer, and pioneering author of picture books for Black children and youth that promoted collaborative Catholic social action on behalf of her race.

Using Postmodern Picture Books as Mentor Texts for Critical Writing Pedagogy

Using the framework of critical writing pedagogy, this study explores how five elementary students utilized craft moves from postmodern picture books in their own writing.

제주 신화 그림책 속에 묘사된 인물 분석

This study is an analysis of characters that appear in mythological picture books set in Jeju Island. The purpose is to examine how mythological characters that have been handed down for a long time are depicted in picture books aimed at children. For this purpose, seven Jeju mythology picture books were selected and the relationships and mystical abilities of the characters in the narrative were analyzed. As a result of the analysis, firstly, the grandparents who appear in Jeju mythology picture books have existed since the beginning and are expressed as gods who protect humans, and secondly, the couple is a bond made in heaven, giving birth to a new god and becoming the starting point of the narrative. Third, children of gods are born with special abilities, but ordinary humans become gods because of their strength or extreme filial piety toward their parents. Fourth, brothers and sisters grow up competing together and remain forever as gods protecting the earth. The characters in the Jeju mythology picture book, modified to fit the needs of children, were connected between stories and continued the genealogy of the gods, and it was revealed that various family forms existed in the past. And the story that begins with the Jeju language and the place where the Jeju region is described can instill pride and identity in the region in children, so it can be used as an educational medium to expand horizons about the local community in educational settings.

Action Research on Picture Book Reading Activities to Support the Development of Korean Emotional Vocabulary for a Child from a Foreign Family

Action Research on Picture Book Reading Activities to Support the Development of Korean Emotional Vocabulary for a Child from a Foreign Family

A Study on Changes in Children's Language Development Through Reading Picture Books

A Study on Changes in Children's Language Development Through Reading Picture Books

A Study on the Development Strategies for Metaverse Picture Books Based on the Reading Characteristics of the Alpha Generation

A Study on the Development Strategies for Metaverse Picture Books Based on the Reading Characteristics of the Alpha Generation

The Effect of Picture Book Linked Robot Play on Story Comperhension and Creativity of 5-Year-Old Children

The Effect of Picture Book Linked Robot Play on Story Comperhension and Creativity of 5-Year-Old Children

Where is the Real Sheep? Exploring the Baahd and Good Sheep Voices in Five Australian Picture Books.

Where is the Real Sheep? Exploring the Baahd and Good Sheep Voices in Five Australian Picture Books.

Image perception and reception in wordless picture books: Eye movements of children with intellectual disabilities.

Wordless picture books enhance comprehension and vocabulary growth and motivate children with intellectual disabilities (ID) to participate in literary activities. However, the reception of picture books can be challenging because deliberate selective attention processes and recognition of the image's meaning are often delayed. Examining eye movements may help explore these cognitive processes. Therefore, we examined eye movements in 29 children with mild and moderate ID as they explored a wordless picture book, presented on a screen and compared them to 14 typically developing children using a Tobii Pro X3-120 eye tracker. The findings showed that children with moderate ID had shorter fixation duration, fixated less often, and revisited regions of interest less frequently. Our results suggest that children with moderate ID have greater difficulties in selectively directing their attention toward regions of visual input with a high level of informativeness and expend less cognitive effort to understand their meaning.

Multimodal text-image synergy in representing interpersonal relations in picture books

Multimodal text-image synergy in representing interpersonal relations in picture books

Digital childhoods and multilingual identities: Preschool children's interactions with a picture book app

Digital childhoods and multilingual identities: Preschool children's interactions with a picture book app

Analysis of Multimodal Metaphor and Values Representation in Children’s Picture Books

Children’s picture books, as a form of text interwoven with vision and language, carry rich cultural information and educational functions. The purpose of this article is to explore the phenomenon of multimodal metaphor in children’s picture books and reveal its influence on ideological construction. Firstly, the article compiles the research background and puts forward the research value of multimodal metaphors in children’s picture books. Then, it constructs an analytical framework for children’s picture books that integrates visual semiotics and metaphor theory, and analyzes the specific use of multimodal metaphors in children’s picture books through example analyses, including the interaction between images and words, the symbolism of colors and shapes, and the construction of metaphors in the narrative structure. These case studies reveal how children’s understanding of the world is shaped by multimodal metaphorical strategies in picture books, which in turn subconsciously convey specific values and ideologies. Future research should explore more deeply the differences of multimodal metaphors in different cultural contexts and their application strategies in children’s education, with a view to cultivating children’s critical thinking and promoting diversified development of children’s picture books.

The Impact of Gender Stereotypes in Children’s Picture Books on Children: A Review

The Impact of Gender Stereotypes in Children’s Picture Books on Children: A Review

Disfluencies as a window to macrostructure performance in the narrative of bilingual children

Disfluencies mirror processes of speech production and when examined in both languages of bilingual children, can provide valuable information regarding their linguistic skills. The aim of this study is to characterize the rates and the types of disfluencies across episodes of a narrative as well as across different story grammar (SG) elements in participants’ home language (Russian) and societal language (Hebrew) as a reflection of narrative macrostructure skills. Twenty bilingual Russian-Hebrew children aged 60–78 months produced narratives in Russian and Hebrew using the wordless picture book Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969). Narratives were transcribed, divided into five episodes, and coded for main SG elements (Character + Setting, Initiating event, Internal response, Plan, Attempt and Consequence). Four types of disfluencies (silent pauses, filled pauses, repetitions, and self-corrections) were analyzed in relation to each SG element per episode in both languages. Overall children produced more SG elements in Russian with a finer analysis showing that Initiating Event, Character and Setting differed across languages while Attempt, Plan and Internal response were similar. Disfluencies significantly impacted macrostructure differently across languages such that in Russian, a high percentage of disfluencies was associated with higher production of Character + Setting and Plan, whereas in Hebrew it was associated with lower production of Attempt and Consequence. The present research suggests that disfluency has impact on macrostructure, and consequently on overall narrative quality differently across the languages. The theoretical contribution may shed light on the understanding of planning and formulation processes among bilingual children. The application of the results may relate to these processes impacting diagnosis and/or intervention protocols in bilingual children.

Censorship in Early Childhood: A Critical Content Analysis of Banned and Challenged Latine Picture Books

Censorship in Early Childhood: A Critical Content Analysis of Banned and Challenged Latine Picture Books

Naturalistic patterns of sustained attention across early childhood: Developmental profiles and longitudinal associations with executive functions.

The capacity to sustain attention over time develops rapidly over early childhood and is associated with socioemotional and cognitive outcomes. However, sustained attention has largely been studied in either shared or independent contexts, leading to gaps in our understanding of how trade-offs between sustained attention to shared versus individual targets may predict later outcomes. We examined this question in a longitudinal sample of 1,290 children (49% female, 43% Black), living in predominately rural, low-income regions, using a naturalistic shared picture book reading task. Children's sustained attention to individual relative to shared targets during the book reading task was measured at 24 and 35 months. Using latent profile analysis, we identified four developmental profiles of children's attentional trajectories: three of the profiles differed in the extent that children' attention shifted toward more socially directed relative to individually directed attention; a fourth profile showed atypical decreases in both socially directed and individually directed attention across development. Importantly, heterogeneity in children's attentional profiles were associated with differences in executive functions at 48 months of age. Specifically, children who showed greater relative increases in socially directed attention had higher executive functions performance, whereas children with atypical decreases in attention showed substantial deficits in this domain. These findings reveal distinct longitudinal patterns of sustained attention in naturalistic contexts and show that heterogeneity in these patterns are robust predictors of subsequent executive functions. This person-centered approach provides novel insights into how quantitative and qualitative changes in attention may impact executive functions development and may help identify children at risk for nonnormative trajectories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Dreamers and caminantes

Migration remains a recurring yet controversial subject in today’s society. Previous research on press discourse has predominantly focused on migration metaphors from their verbal construction (Santa Ana, 1999; O’Brien, 2003) and the interplay with the visual mode in articles (Catalano & Waugh, 2013; Catalano & Mitchell-McCollough, 2019) or political cartoons (El Refaie, 2003). This genre frequently reflects an unfavorable and discriminatory representation of migrants through the lens of the host country. However, children’s picture books addressing this sensitive issue have received little attention despite their pedagogical value for promoting intercultural, positive attitudes at an early age in an increasingly multicultural and multilingual world. Our study aims to examine the metaphorical construction of migration in Yuyi Morales’ picture book Dreamers, combining the cognitive and social semiotic approaches (Forceville, 2016; Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006; Painter et al., 2013) to shed light on how both frameworks can complement each other in Critical Discourse Analysis and to demonstrate how children’s picture books can constructively contribute to social change by providing a counterbalancing voice to the dominant narrative on migration.

Diverse Book Finders: Diversifying a Children’s Picture Book Collection by Integrating Acquisitions Into a Classroom Experience

Two recent trends in collection development include finding new ways to bring patron voices into collection development and developing strategies for increasing the diversity and representation within collections. Indiana University Southeast (IU-Southeast) Library recently developed a project that combined these two strategic directions by embedding an acquisition experience that used students enrolled in a sophomore block elementary education course to use the Diverse Book Finder (DBF) to select diverse picture books for the IU-Southeast collection. While diversification strategies and projects around children’s picture book collections in academic libraries are nothing new, IU-Southeast’sproject is unique in its incorporating of students to participate in the selection and diversification of a collection, rather than relying on more traditional strategies driven by librarian or faculty selection. This case study focuses on the design of the project, the integration and embedding of the acquisition project into the education course, how the DBF and its collection were leveraged to enhance the learning experience, and the effect this experience had on the diversity of the IU-Southeast Library collection and on the faculty, librarians, and students that were involved.