Readers matter: seven transactions with the visual, linguistic and material elements in a picture book
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Date
2023
Authors
Colton, J.
Serafini, F.
Lovett, T.
Forrest, S.
Gale, J.
Gehling, K.
Shin, A.M.
Carter, J.
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Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 2023; 46(3):219-231
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In this paper, we draw upon Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading to frame six readings of a picture book. The picture book, There’s a Ghost in This House by Oliver Jeffers, was selected for a children’s literature reading group which brought together literacy researchers and teacher educators to share their encounters with the text. The question “How did you read the book?” provoked us to examine how we had transacted with the text to generate interpretations. This work was presented at the “Stories that Matter” seminar alongside the other papers appearing in this special edition of the Australian Journal of Language and Literacy.
In this paper, we highlight our own roles as readers encountering Jeffer’s book and reflect on our own responses as a way of explaining the multiple readings we present. We emphasise the place of intertextuality and intratextuality in reader response and argue that Rosenblatt’s transactional theory continues to be an important way of understanding what it means to read, including the reading of multimodal texts which combine linguistic, visual and material modes.
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Copyright 2023 Crown. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Access Condition Notes: Open Access funding enabled and organized by CAUL and its Member Institutions The Mem Fox/ALEA Children’s Literature Fellowship is jointly funded by Mem Fox, ALEA and UniSA.