The category of nonfiction picture books has changed in the past few decades, putting more emphasis on engaging writing styles, attention to accuracy, and using synergic relations between images and texts. As a result of this shift, the strategies taught to students for reading nonfiction picture books must change. The author presents five strategies that readers navigating new nonfiction picture books can use to comprehend all of the information provided by authors and illustrators: reading the pictures, tracking the words, focusing on the medium, analyzing the back matter, and highlighting the text in visual elements. When readers use these strategies, new nonfiction picture books encourage them to think critically, engage in their own research, and dive deeply into the content they are reading about.
Informed by theories of reading as transactions and new literacies, the authors discuss the powerful possibilities of reconsidering reader response with contemporary nonfiction children’s literature.
The purpose of this study was to explore the ways emergent bilingual first-graders draw on multiple linguistic resources during reading assessments and the participation of their Spanish-dominant parents in those assessments, as children engaged in English and Spanish retelling tasks. Informed by a translanguaging lens, sociopsycholinguistic and holistic approaches to reading and critical approaches to family literacy, the analysis centres on assessment sessions with two mother–child dyads whose children attended school in a relatively new migration setting. Primary data were drawn from four reading assessment sessions and audio-recordings over a 7-month period with each child, individual interviews and home visits with mothers, and field notes from research team members. The analysis examined linguistic patterns related to second-language approximations and code-switching in miscues and oral retellings. The analysis also includes coding of strategies and resources children used in their English and Spanish retelling of the same text, using their home language to retell the texts to their mothers. Findings illustrate that while children’s miscues may be shaped by their developing control of syntactic structures and new vocabulary, they draw from multiple language resources in English retellings, conveying their complex understandings of texts. We also found that the children negotiated translating and retelling for their parents in different ways, shaped by their family literacy practices. These involved co-construction of stories, a focus on accuracy and the paraphrasing and embellishing of stories and dialogue. Insights from this study highlight the complexity of pooled language resources in young children’s repertoires. Findings also document the situated nature of oral retelling at home, when parents engage children in the sharing and translating of English books in ways that align with existing roles, practices and goals. Implications for equitable literacy assessment in new migration contexts are discussed.
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