Storytelling is inherent to all societies. People have been sharing stories since time immemorial to better understand the world around them and to attempt to empathise with realities different from their own. It is through stories that we can make sense of events, phenomena and circumstances of life that we may have not experienced first-hand. Stories allow us to come into contact with aspects of reality that we would not otherwise encounter. In this way, the possibility to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes opens up: we get to experience emotions that are completely new to us.
Stories captivate us and appeal to us; thus, they are valuable tools for creating strong emotional bonds. Stories serve an essential socialising function, bridging the gap between the individual and society. This means that stories provide us with the knowledge and the skills necessary to interact with people and to deal with institutionalised conventions.
Moreover, stories can fulfil a more ideological purpose in transmitting powerful communal values (Rothery & Stenglin, 1997, p. 231). Stories reflect culturally-specific ideas about the world and, to different degrees of explicitness, hold and promote significant values. Some stories are about our family history: they offer glimpses into the lives of previous generations. Others tell us about our origins and heritage as a bigger community: our city, our country. And some even explore our reality as human beings and the connections we can discover and strengthen with others. We learn a lot about the importance of friendship, love, peace, freedom, justice from the stories we share. They help us build the paradigm through which we look at the world.
All kinds of stories can frame our worldview. Some stories are told as oral recounts of our dreams early in the morning, others as anecdotes at the dinner table, and yet others as bed-side narratives, like fairy tales and picture books. Picture story books are unique in that they bring together two kinds of languages –the language of words and the language of images– to convey one single message. In doing so, they represent a true challenge for children, since they require a more complex decoding of meanings. But at the same time, it is this combination of text and pictures that makes them particularly engaging and aesthetically attractive.
Picture books, with their singular characteristics and intended audience, are ideal for the transmission of values and the sharing of life experiences. Thus, these texts are invaluable both in private, family life and public, instructional settings, since they “play a foundational role in the lives and education of young children in several ways” (Painter et al., 2013, p. 1). Not only can children enhance their linguistic skills through their contact with picture books, but they can also learn valuable lessons as regards socialisation.
The natural richness of stories renders them useful in educational contexts. Although this is certainly true in the context of first language literacy, it is even more so in second or foreign language instruction. On the one hand, picture books allow students to come into contact with instances of authentic use of language in approachable, engaging contexts transmitted through the familiar rhythm of stories. Besides, in picture books in particular, the presence of images aids interpretation. When young readers find language well beyond their mastery as they read, they are able to comprehend it all the same with the help of illustrations.
On the other hand, because stories are vehicles for constructing reality, exploring relationships and shaping the understanding of experience, they are also appropriate tools in the classroom to spark conversation about abstract ideas and jointly held values. The world within the covers of a picture book is more easily manageable for children than the real world, which makes it possible for them to analyse aspects of that world in depth and eventually transfer that into real-life experience. In picture books, students learn how reality works, how human relationships are established and maintained, and how elements of experience are put together to be meaningful. Learning about these aspects of reality helps bring up relevant issues for discussion in class. Their abundant linguistic and social worth, then, can place picture books in a unique position in the classroom, particularly in second and foreign language acquisition.
In this book we aim to explore functional ways to incorporate picture story books in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom, both to understand them better and to potentially create meaning through the combination of text and image. There has been plenty of research conducted on narratives and on the language typically used in them and, in particular, within the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) tradition which informs this book. Much of this research has been built upon to suggest new approaches for local educators to teach narratives in Working with Texts in the EFL Classroom (Boccia et al., 2013) and Teaching and learning EFL through genres (Boccia et al., 2019), published by the same team of researchers at Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Mendoza, Argentina, that we belong to. Our focus now, then, will be on the visual resources involved in picture story books used in the EFL classroom.
Images and the role they play within narratives have been systematised in several books that we will go over and elaborate on in the following chapters; however, opportunities for further analysis and application in the classroom still exist. To add to this area of research, we worked with over seventy sample texts, including many award-winning picture story books. Some were given awards for the stories themselves, the illustrations, or both, such as the Caldecott Medal, the National Book Award in the USA, the Kurt Maschler Award, the Kate Greenaway Medal and the Children’s Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year. We chose these books as they were written by renowned authors and are of outstanding quality in terms of bimodal meaning-making.
With this purpose in mind, we propose six chapters that delve into different areas. The chapters gradually move from understanding how words and images work together in picture story books, through exploring how bimodal meanings can be created, to providing teachers with effective resources to take the comprehension and production of bimodal narratives into the EFL classroom.
In chapter 1 we present the conceptual backbone of the book, providing teachers with the theoretical foundations necessary to make the most of the multimodality tools offered in this book. In chapters 2, 3 and 4, we look into particular configurations of visual resources, grouped according to their functions, which prove essential to both understand and, later, produce bimodal narratives. Chapter 2 explores how to create characters, construct plot and represent circumstances. Chapter 3 examines the resources to build the relationship between characters and readers. Chapter 4 analyses ways in which feelings are expressed, judgment is called for and valuation is fostered in readers. In chapter 5, we deal with connections between specific resources and stages in a story, analysing how the resources explored in previous chapters can be put together meaningfully to create a single text. Finally, we reach the ultimate ambition of our book in chapter 6, where we offer ideas for classroom activities foregrounding the teaching and learning of bimodal resources.
