An exploration of the impact of picture book illustrations on the comprehension skills and vocabulary development of emergent readers

The formal instruction process of teaching reading to emergent and beginning readers needs to incorporate a much more multimodal approach. People today, not only in America but in many other countries as well, are more graphically bombarded than any other generation has ever been. Children in our society expect to experience pictures and images in almost everything they encounter. This graphic orientation needs to become an instructional opportunity and be incorporated into the educational process in ways that are beneficial to the learning environments of children in our educational systems. Reading programs need to forego one-dimensional teaching methods and learn how to expand their methodologies by taking advantage of various approaches that prove to be advantageous to the development of children.; This study adds another dimension to the research conducted by Azripe and Styles (2003), as seen in their publication Children Reading Picture: Interpreting Visual Texts. It also contributes pertinent information to Paivio's work concerning his Theory of Dual Coding.; Research for this study centered on observing emergent readers as they demonstrated comprehension and retelling skills both with and without the aid of illustrations that would normally accompany a story. Observations and informal, descriptive assessment of indirect vocabulary development in relation to the books used in the study were conducted. These observations and assessments were directly linked to whether the student-participant was shown or not shown the illustrations of a story that was read to him or her. The study also described the personal impact that picture book illustrations had on students in relationship to the processes of learning how to read.; This study showed that students who visually experienced the illustrations accompanying a picture book demonstrated moderate improvement in overall story comprehension and retelling ability than those who did not see the pictures of the story. Of more significance was the fact that students, in two different study settings, who saw the pictures as a story was read exhibited greater indirect vocabulary development than did those students who did not see the illustrations as the story was read aloud to them.