Narelle Oliver: The role of Picture Books in the Literature Strand of the New National English Curriculum Years 4-7

Session description:

Narelle originally presented this session to 300 delegates at the Qld Studies authority and ACARA 2010 conference ‘Shared Vision: an Australian curriculum P-12’, Brisbane Convention Centre, April 28-30, 2010.

Picture books are listed as one of the multimodal genres of literature suitable for study in the new English curriculum for Years 4-7. So, why study picture books? Aren’t they too simple for these year levels? In terms of studying literature in all its forms, what can be gained from studying picture books?

In this session, Narelle reveals how the authors and illustrators of picture books make a myriad of choices in terms of visual cues and words they use in order to convey a story in all its richness and complexity, its motives and power relationships between characters, its emotions, sense of place, broader social and historical issues, and its points of view.

Picture books rely on a special interaction between visual and written texts and this is valuable to study in its own right. But there are more reasons to choose picture books for close scrutiny with year 4-7 students. The visual devices used in picture book illustrations share many common attributes with film. Likewise, because every word in a picture book counts, the written text of a picture book often offers a concentrated, clear and very accessible sample of linguistic devices which also exist, but are often more difficult to locate, in longer written works. Thus, the study of visual and linguistic devices used in picture books offers a perfect pathway to the study of other literature such as film and novels.

Narelle summarises and examines the ‘literature strand’ of the new national curriculum and analyses how the study of written and visual texts of picture books, using her own as specific examples, meet the curriculum objectives in this strand for each year level 4-7.

Topics:

Literature and literacy The imperative of providing fully-qualified literature-oriented teacher-librarians in order for this strand to be implemented Summary of objectives of the literature strand of the new national curriculum Features of picture books which meet these objectives so successfully