Alter / Merse Re-thinking Picturebooks for Intermediate and Advanced Learners: Perspectives for Secondary English Language Education

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-3-8233-0382-4
Verlag: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 262 Seiten

Reihe: narr STUDIENBÜCHER LITERATUR- UND KULTURWISSENSCHAFT

Der didaktische Wert von Picturebooks für den Englischunterricht in der Grundschule gilt als unumstritten. Jedoch gibt es in Forschung und Unterrichtspraxis derzeit kaum Ansätze, wie der Transfer dieses vermeintlich kindlichen Literaturmediums in die Sekundarstufe gelingen kann. Dieser Band legitimiert Picturebooks als komplex angelegte Textform, die sich auch mit fortgeschrittenen Lernenden zu kompetenz- und inhaltsorientierter Arbeit im Englischunterricht anbietet. Die im Band versammelten konzeptuellen und empirischen Perspektiven zeigen angehenden und praktizierenden Lehrkräften konkret auf, wie vielfältig Picturebooks den Unterricht bereichern können. Eine große Bandbreite praktischer Beispiele verdeutlicht ihr Potenzial für den Englischunterricht der Sekundarstufen - von der Förderung verschiedener literacies und literarischen Lernens bis hin zur Fokussierung von Themen wie Umwelt, sozialer Gerechtigkeit oder kultureller Diversität.

Prof. Dr. Grit Alter ist Hochschul-Professorin für Fachdidaktik Englisch an der Pädagogischen Hochschule Tirol, Innsbruck. Prof. Dr. Thorsten Merse lehrt Didaktik des Englischen (EFL Education) an der Universität Duisburg- Essen.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Alter, Grit

Merse, Thorsten

Leseproben

A Picturebooks for intermediate and advanced learners
In the context of this book’s goal, that is to open up the engagement with picturebooks for intermediate and advanced learners in English as a foreign language (EFL) education and ELT, let us now intensify the deconstruction of the notions of age, audience, or readership by looking at Bader’s definition of picturebooks that is circulating widely in research: A picture book is text, illustrations, total design; an item of manufacture and a commercial product; a social, cultural, historical document; and foremost, an experience for a child. As an art form, it hinges on the interdependence of pictures and words, on the simultaneous display of two facing pages, and on the drama of turning the page. On its own terms its possibilities are limitless. (Bader 1976: 1) This often-quoted position on picturebooks not only indicates the complexity of this genre and the different perspectives from which to engage with them, but also offers points of entry for our conceptual re-thinking of picturebooks. Surely, in 1976 the notion of an “experience for a child” was accountable as “picturebooks for adults were scarcely known at that time” (Ommundsen 2014: 31). Recent changes and developments on the picturebook market which now does offer picturebooks explicitly written and published for adults (Ommundsen 2018) allow for an even stronger emphasis on the endless possibilities picturebooks offer. Hence, for us, the endless possibilities that picturebooks have and offer for reading and engaging with the text also mean that the text is not only an experience for the child. It is, foremost, an experience for any reader who finds pleasure in aesthetic and literary encounters. Finding this pleasure cannot be limited to any age group, particularly since individual readers will encounter a plethora of various picturebooks. Broadly speaking, picturebooks can be fictional or informational. On their website PEPELT, Ellis, Gruenbaum, Mourão and Sadowska (n.y.) suggest that fictional picturebooks include fairy tales, fables, and their modern re-tellings, as well as picturebooks about monsters and dragons and with a focus on fantasy. In their style, they can be created through songs, poems and/or rhymes, or could also be works without verbal text at all. These books can cover a wide range of topics and themes, starting from stories about friendship, family, adventures, or stories about different places in the world, their people, and cultures. Informational picturebooks are texts that offer an aesthetic experience while simultaneously imparting knowledge (Ellis et al. n.y.; cf. also Goga/Iversen/Teigland 2021; von Merveldt 2018). These include concept, number and ABC-books as well as activity books, pop-up and wimmelbooks, but also books about nature, history, or biographies. Due to the often-limited ability of particularly younger children to read verbal text, these picturebooks rely on a multimodal design in that they not only display illustrations but various visuals such as maps, diagrams, photography, and/or cut-away pages and flaps. Similar to fictional picturebooks, also informational picturebooks can be presented in verses, narratives, or in a more descriptive and explanatory style of writing. Sipe’s (2008b) categorization of picturebooks mixes elements of design and content as he suggests a) (nearly) wordless picturebooks, b) playful postmodern picturebooks, and c) picturebooks on serious social issues. Bland (2013) uses a similar set, but divides Sipe’s third category into picturebooks with an implicit sociocultural agenda, and picturebooks with an environmental perspective (see Summer’s contribution to this volume for further branches). When it comes to thematic criteria, all kinds of further sub-categories are possible: picturebooks about friendship, about love, about diversity, about festivities, and so forth. Ommundsen (2006) distinguishes between naïve, complex, and existential picturebooks, but underlines that picturebooks can often belong to more than one category. Naïve picturebooks are texts in which “the author or illustrator writes or draws in a childlike fashion, as a child would do. The naive can be understood as a way to create art according to children’s premises, or a way to implant child perspectives into art” (Goga 2011 in Ommundsen 2017: 73). The second category includes picturebooks that have become more complex “with polyphonic multilayered narrative structures and advanced literary devices traditionally thought of as adult.” To continue Ommunden’s distinctions, complex picturebooks create higher reading demands and develop cognitive skills, which in turn indicates that they “can be read on different levels, depending on the reader’s frame of reference” (Ommundsen 2015: 73). In her third category, Ommundsen opens up a thematic and content-driven trajectory. For her, [e]xistential picturebooks may be challenging for both children and adults alike, as they tackle crucial questions in human life: life and death, love, friendship and loneliness, identity and belonging. They might also treat subjects traditionally thought of as tabooed in children’s literature: war, domestic violence, child abuse, broken relationships and divorce. (Ommundsen 2017: 73) What follows from this distinction is that readers of all ages may engage with such picturebooks to enjoy or develop individual readings and interpretations of themes and questions they consider relevant and central in their lives. Interestingly, Ommundsen points out that her systematic distinctions are not necessarily and always clear-cut. Therefore, she introduces the powerful concept of “crossover picturebooks [that] simultaneously include traits from all three” (Ommundsen 2017: 74), which might result in even more complex and multilayered readings the more these categories interact and overlap. The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks (Kümmerling-Meibauer 2021) distinguishes between early-concept books and concept books, wimmelbooks, ABC-books, pop-up and movable books, wordless, postmodern, and crossover picturebooks, picturebooks for adults, informational picturebooks, poetry in picturebooks, multilingual picturebooks and digital picturebooks, which resembles the categories suggested by others above. And, similar to the categories above, there are plenty of picturebooks that fit into more than one category. All of these categorizations can certainly be justified as it is possible to match almost every picturebook into one of the boxes suggested here. Even so, when it comes to thinking about the potential of picturebooks for intermediate and advanced learners, we believe it is necessary to take further criteria than the style and themes these refer to into account. The main aspect would be that such picturebooks would have to include an element that makes the text interesting for an audience that authors and illustrators originally may not have had in mind when creating the book. Simultaneously, whether a picturebook has potential for intermediate and advanced learners or not depends on how the book is implemented in teaching scenarios and what the learners do with the text. When re-thinking picturebooks for intermediate and advanced learners, we consider the following categories to be relevant points of orientation. There are picturebooks for children with which intermediate and advanced learners can critically consider the norms and values a society holds dear so that these are worthy of being implemented in the youngest generation through picturebooks, e.g., the value of friendship, and respect for animals and the natural world. Using picturebooks, intermediate and advanced learners can deconstruct ideological assumptions authors inscribe into their texts, even if co-consciously. Ideologies here refers to a “cognitive framework that shapes […] knowledge, opinions and attitudes, and social representations” (van Dijk 2008: 34 in Stephens 2018: 137). These are shared by members of a community or society and influence their social practice. An analytical perspective on ideology is concerned with uncovering “assumptions which determine a society’s sense of meaning and value” (Stephens 2018: 137). In this sense, a moral contained in a text is never without ideology. Authors and texts always transport assumptions about how the world is and should be, how human existence in and with the world ought to be. Current critical investigations have revealed that a lot of picturebooks follow an ideology that constructs white, bodily standardized, and heterosexual people as the norm. For example, girls immigrating to the United States are only acknowledged if they write their name in English or are asked to change it to match their new classmates’ pronunciation abilities (Alter 2016), illustrators hide children’s legs that are said to be ‘dysfunctional’ behind clouds, blankets and dogs (Alter/Aho 2018; disability in general cf. Blaska 2003; Ali 2022), and LGBTIQ+ people and issues have largely been silenced in picturebooks or not represented, which is only gradually beginning to change (Merse 2017, 2018; Hedberg/Venzo/Young 2022). In educational settings, these picturebooks can mainly be used to foster students’ critical thinking skills. They read the picturebooks and challenge who the protagonists are regarding the construction of their identity, i.e., whether they can be read as someone with a diversity background who has formerly been underrepresented in literary texts. Students can challenge the way in which these minoritized protagonists are represented, i.e., do they merely happen to be part of the cast, or do they have voice and agency? Are they...