Reading Workshop

Anthony Browne, the former Children's Literature Laureate of the UK has recently released a new picturebook called What If ? This enjoyable story documents a young boy's fear of going to a birthday party. He forgot the address and he and his mother search the houses along a street for the right home. In typical Browne fashion, what is revealed as the two of them look into the windows of various houses along the street is unexpected. Great story for facing your fears.

This is an excerpt from my review in Linguistics and Education about Reading Visual Narratives. This is an excellent resource for understanding how picturebooks work from a multimodal perspective:           The book, Reading Visual Narratives: Image Analysis of Children’s Picture Books offers educators and visual theorists a detailed analysis of the visual-verbal relations in children’s picturebooks. Aligned with systemic functional linguistics (Halliday, 1975, 1978) , this volume adapts the theories of visual grammar first proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) to focus attention on the verbal and visual narratives in contemporary children’s picturebooks. By doing so, the authors have presented a comprehensive analytical framework for considering the multimodal aspects of picturebooks and serves as a valuable resource for researchers and educators to approach multimodal ensembles, in particular contemporary picturebooks, with a more enlightened eye (Eisner, 1998) .