Developing Students' Interpretive Repertoires

Abstract

As readers encounter visual images, design elements in addition to the written language incorporated into contemporary picturebooks, the repertoire of strategies students need to draw upon must expand to deal with the aspects of these texts beyond decoding of written language. The study reported here was designed to investigate how students interpreted contemporary picturebooks, the meanings they constructed during their readings and discussions, and the instructional approaches used to support the development of students’ interpretive strategies for comprehending the visual and design features of multimodal texts, in particular contemporary picturebooks.