| Over the years,picture books have been widely accepted at homes and in the kindergartens,as the books have a crucial effect on the development of children and affect their reading interest.In terms of the content,picture books are unique and perfect combinations of literature,art,and education.In this sense,researchers have conducted a series of studies on picture books,which demonstrated that picture books play a crucial role in the development of children's emotion,language acquisition,visual literacy,aesthetic competence and cognitive ability.Engagement which refers to the negotiation between reader and various voices in the discourse,is a useful reference in explicating the reader-writer relationship of the reading process.Previous research has made explorations of engagement in various types of texts.In regard to the previous engagement studies of picture books,the dialogic approach locates engagement in the analysis of visual resources in picture books;the educational approach focuses on the indicators of engagement in the picture book reading process.In other words,the dialogic approach is mainly concerned with picture books in a theoretical way,while the educational approach mainly focuses on the readers' reading process by the empirical analysis.In this sense,the present study combines the two perspectives of engagement together to explore the nature of reader-writer relationship.Situated within the Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL)and engagement theories,this study aims to provide theoretical and empirical for the reader engagement by discussing the visual resources of picture books which make readers engaged on different planes and identifying the readers' engagement behaviors in the reading process.A total of 65,six-to seven-year-old children enrolled in a primary school in Jinan participated in this study.The data are collected from the video recordings of picture book reading class and audio recordings of semi-structured interviews.Using the qualitative method,readers' responses in picture book reading process are analyzed into the visual resources in picture books which make readers engaged and manifestations of reader engagement.The results of the study reveal the nature of interaction between readers and picture books on the basis of the analysis of readers' responses in the reading process.Based on the analysis of the data collected,readers'responses mainly manifest as readers' engagement behaviors and readers' interpretations on the visual resources in the reading process.Engagement resources are further discussed on the content and expression plane;readers' engagement behaviors manifest in a multidimensional(behavioral,affective and cognitive)way.The present study is significant in both theoretical and practical perspectives.Theoretically,it provides a new perspective to study the picture books and explore the reader-writer relationship.In addition,it enriches the engagement framework in the multimodal discourse on the basis of the empirical study.Practically,it provides implications for parents/teachers to guide children's picture books reading,and giving suggestions to image producers in a multimodal lens. |
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