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Second Graders’ Interpretation Of Character In Picturebook Illustrations, Angeli Willson, Lori Falcon, Miriam Martinez

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts

This qualitative research study explored second graders’ use of visual information to understand characters in picturebooks. Students participated in whole class read-alouds of three picturebooks. Immediately following each read-aloud, students were individually interviewed and invited to talk about the visual text in pre-selected illustrations. Findings revealed that the children used pictorial information, including character actions, body posture, and facial expressions, to support their inferences about characters. They also attended to color and line in justifying their insights. However, the children did not tend to some critical pictorial information in interpreting character including pictorial symbols, the position and size of characters …