Reading and understanding picture books: A study of learners’ engagement with aspects of ambiguity in literary texts
Project Description
The project focuses on explorative research into the reading processes and sense-making of lower-intermediate learners of English. In the quasi-experimental study, learners in grades 5-8 are observed reading an authentic English picture book in groups of three.
Project Details
Employing introspective methods, participants are asked to verbalize what they understand and how they establish this understanding by relating the verbal and visual codes. Following this, they take part in an interview focussing on the relation of verbal and pictorial codes, story constituents as well as the substance of content, and the ambiguity and indeterminacy of symbolic representations respectively.
As a follow-up to the quasi-experimental setting, teachers of learner groups in Year 7 design lessons based on the key aspects identified in the interviews at three different levels of difficulty. As data sets, we collect both the teachers’ reflections for (planning) and on (evaluation) action as well as learner products (multimodal texts). To incorporate the learners’ perspectives, retrospective qualitative interviews are conducted with groups of learners from each participating learner group.