Young+CHildren's+Interpretations+of+Page+Breaks+in+Contemporary+Picture+Storybooks

Reading File 2 Sipe, L., & Brightman, A. (2009). Young Children’s Interpretations of Page Breaks in Contemporary Picture Storybooks. //Journal of Literacy Research 41//(68), p. 68-103.

This qualitative analysis study examines the importance of page turns in second graders critical thinking skills. The study helps teachers and researchers understand the difference between page breaks in a novel and picture book genre. The page breaks in a picture book is thoughtfully designed by authors, illustrators,, editors, and designers and it has a “complex semiotic significance”. Theorists such as Bader, Iser, Bartow, Barthes guide the premise of this study. Barber’s recognition of the drama in page turns, Bader’s representation of excitement, anticipation, and confusion, and Iser’s indeterminacies that readers have to fill in while reading picture book are mind boggling to someone new to analyzing page turns. Several picture book sare used as examples to explain the above characteristics that the theorists recognized about page turns. For example, Where are the Wild Things are? Was used to help children understand Max’s mood signaled through page turn. The five ways that writers of picture books use as observed by Christopher Maselli provides a lot of interesting insights in to how children process the page turns while reading. Page turns creates a sense of movement, introduces surprise, helps focus on different characters, introduces new art, and creates an urge in readers to continue reading. Christelow and Jensen both affirm the surprise factor while children turn the page(s). According to Kiefer, Lewis, Nikalojeva, & Scott, Nedelman, and Stewig, although the picture book production team observes that page turn as are beneficial to children, books on picture books just mentions about page turn and there is no research related findings. Also, the topic of page turns is related to read aloud in the process of literary understanding in children. This research is based on how children construct mean socially as compared to finding meaning in the text. The second premise of this research is based on how children can arrive at several interpretations based on one text. Bakhtin’s “centripetal” versus “centrifugal” meaning making explains this aspect well. The third call is that teacher exerts limited control over the text so children can come up with multiple interpretations on his or her own. Teacher involvement will thwart the children’s capacity to understand and interpret the text on their own. The authors of this study invite teachers to consider Rosenblatt’s (1978) transaction theory, where “children bring their own store of knowledge and experiences” (p. 77). Such approaches will facilitate greater literary understanding such as plot, character, story elements etc and extending the meaning making process to inference and cognition. Children must be taught to become independent interpreters and storytellers. Talks about page break helps children to become active participants in the process of verbalization about the story. The three effects of talk are – helps struggling children, who depend on their classmates for connections in the book, aid in metacognition by allowing children to think about their own thinking of the story, and recognize the ability to derive at different interpretations and learn that there can be several meanings to one story. This study aimed at second graders interpretation of page breaks in five picture books while the books were read aloud to them in class. The children were introduced with the idea of observing and interpreting page breaks through questioning in class while referring to specific pages of the chosen books. The design here was to help children think about page breaks as part of “Children’s ‘literary tool box’” (p. 81). “No, David” by Shannon encouraged children to look into what happened in the story based on the illustrations because this book has very few words to help children rely on the text. Another book, “My Friend Rabbit” by Rohmann was used to look for children’s interpretations to plot point of one particular incident in the book. The third book, “Don’t Let Piegon Ride the Bus” by Wiliams was used to elicit audience participation, which is a different from looking at page breaks in the other books. The fourth book, “Hondo and Fabian” by McCarty was used to help children look at parallel story telling. The final choice was “Where the Wild Things Are” by Sendak. This book was used because this book is familiar to the children, so speculation about page breaks was easy and it was used to find out if children could recognize the shift in genre through page breaks. The data collected were coded for seven themes – character action, creating dialogue, internal state of the character, setting change, time elapsed, changes in reader perspective, and literary genre change. The authors rightly note that six out of these six themes were the good old literary analysis that children are familiar with. However, the category on changes in the reader/viewer’s visual perspective is the new theme the teachers discovered through the data analysis. This theme focused on the illustrations and how children perceived them as a slow moving movie, where the illustration are closer sometimes and farther at other times. This study was an initial exploratory study and can be expanded to research the alternate approaches to pedagogical practices in literary analysis. According to Sipe and Brightman (2009), “This type of activity adds one more item to children’s literary repertoire, as well as increasing their cognitive and critical literary abilities in general” (p. 98).

Questions
 * 1) Do children think of their own incidents while turning the pages?
 * 2) What happens if children come back to a page after several minutes or do children lose their train of thought if the pages are not turned sequentially?
 * 3) Does page turn facilitate imagination? I know the authors said that it helps create suspense, but I am looking at their imagination. My son would make up his own stories when I would read a book to him. This habit of concoction was more prevalent during page turns because sometimes we both did not know what to expect.