Bilingual Students' Meaning-Making Strategies When Exploring Wordless Picturebooks in Interactive Shared Reading.

A limited number of studies have investigated how different genres of wordless picturebooks impact children's interactions and story creations in the context of shared book reading. Employing a transactional theory as a guiding lens, this study explores second-grade Korean-English bilingual students' dialogical patterns of interaction during interactive shared book reading, where different genres (i.e., realistic, fantasy, historical, & science fictions, folktale, and narrative nonfiction) of wordless picturebooks were provided. Using an open and a priori coding, eight codes are developed to identify the students' meaning-making strategies when analyzing illustrations and building storylines of the wordless picturebooks. The findings present that the bilingual students engaged in deeper interaction with the pictorial images and utilized diverse but different meaning-making strategies according to the genres of wordless picturebooks. For instance, the students made greater personal connections and integrated a larger number of their emotional expressions when making stories from the fictions than the narrative nonfiction. Since elementary school curriculum lacks the pedagogy that includes visual literacy, the study suggests third spaces like Heritage Language schools can be desirable places to develop such essential skills. The findings provide implications that using different genres of wordless picturebooks can be an influential pedagogical instrument to help students develop their visual literacy competencies. Since pictorial images in wordless picturebooks display multiple layers of meanings, interpretations, and comprehension, teachers must acknowledge that students' voices and responses from different visual literacy should be valued during shared reading activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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