Literacy Volume 00 Number 0 xxx 2012 1

Reviews

Emergent Literacy: Children’s Booksfrom 0 to 3 Bettina Kummerling-Meibauer (Ed). (2011) Amsterdam: JohnBenjamins Publishing Company. ISBN:978 90 272 1808 7 hb; 978 90 272 8323 8eb, 275pp., £89.94

This book is the 13th volume in a mul-tidisciplinary series, which presentsstudies on written language with em-phasis on social and cultural settings.I confess that I had not heard of thisseries before but when I saw the ti-tle of this volume, I was excited andeager to read it. The opening paragraphof the first chapter, written by the ed-itor, increased my excitement. It con-sisted of many questions and even thefirst one opened up all sorts of possibil-ities in my mind – “How do we knowwhat very young children aged from10 months to three years learn by jointlooking at pictures in picture booksor by intensively listening to a chil-dren’s story book”? As somebody whohas spent much of her career stressingthe importance of these early encoun-ters with texts, I wanted to know theanswers!

In the first chapter, Kummerling-Meibauer sets the scene for the wholevolume. She discusses the importanceof scholarly study of books for veryyoung children and the difficulties ofcarrying out such study. She relatesthe types of text available for veryyoung children to their developmen-tal stages, from books with noisesand actions that are more like play-things to the ‘early-concept’ books thatvery deliberately focus on lexical andconceptual acquisition and finally tobooks that introduce a simple narra-tive structure. Kummerling-Meibauerargues, quite correctly I believe, thatthe growing field of children’s lit-erature and within this, research onpicture books tends to ignore bookstargeted at children under 3 years ofage. She goes back to the work of Frobeland Pestalozzi for early claims of theimportance of books for early learningand argues that the development sincethe 1980s of work in emergent liter-acy alongside work in infant cognitionhave tended to grow in parallel. Thetheoretical framework of multimodalliteracy refers to the relationships be-tween image and text, image and writ-ing and image and story telling, butlittle work has taken the multimodal as-pects of emergent literacy into consid-eration.

The papers in this volume arose froman international conference held nearCologne in 2009, which brought to-gether scholars from the fields of chil-dren’s literature, picture book theory,art history, linguistics, cognitive psy-chology and pedagogy. Kummerling-Meibauer argues that this volume is thefirst serious examination of “the roleand influence of children’s literature onthe cognitive, linguistic and aestheticdevelopment of young children”.

The volume is organised into threesections. Part One claims to look at ba-sic issues concerning early literacy suchas children’s drawings and their devel-oping sense of fictionality, the develop-ment of colour perception and the mu-tual influence of pedagogy and basicdesign. Part Two examines the rangeof books available for children underthree, addressing issues such as visualand verbal metaphors, concept and lin-guistic acquisition and the aestheticqualities of books. Part Three consistsmainly of case studies of interactionsaround texts.

Kummerling-Meibauer concludesher introduction by inviting the reader“to follow the trail according to herown interests”. If I had done that Iwould have turned straight to PartThree as it was in this section thatnames and topics with which I felt athome were to be found – Janet Evanswriting about developing a sense ofself through play, talk and stories;Virginia Lowe writing about readingaloud with children and Evelyn Arizpeand Jane Blatt writing about booksand emotional development. However,I was reading this book in order toreview it and so I turned first to PartOne.

Lesley Lancaster began by explor-ing children’s engagement with thematerial representation of culturalmeanings. The paper starts with afascinating autobiographical accountof being given a copy of Struwwelpeterto look at as a very young child andthe impact this had on her ensuingnightmare. Lancaster uses this nar-rative to argue the close relationshipbetween conventional texts and livedtexts in the minds of children. Shethen analyses in detail a 2-year-oldchild’s textual activity during a visit toDisneyland. Through this she showshow children both interpret and pro-duce texts, understanding more aboutcomplex textual structures than mightbe imagined. Lancaster draws parallelsbetween young children as creators of

original texts and the “highly eclecticsemiotically speaking” world of picturebooks.

The next two chapters in Part Oneare Annette Werner’s discussion ofthe significance of colour in picturebooks in relation to the developmentof colour perception and Martin RomanDepper’s look at the use of basic shapesin picture books. He compares mod-ern art’s use of elementary shapes anddiscusses how “the aesthetically inno-vative dimension of elementary reduc-tions” supports the imaginative powersof very young children. I found thesechapters more difficult to grasp; as Iread, I felt that there was something im-portant there, which was eluding meand I intend to go back and reread sev-eral times.

Part Two took me back into my com-fort zone with Kathleen Ahrens’ paperon the beginnings of literature appreci-ation. Many times I have been in bookshops watching parents or grandpar-ents choosing books for young childrenand have longed to join in and sharesome advice; sometimes I have done so!Ahrens identifies three criteria for se-lecting picture book narratives to readaloud to very young children and looksat some classic picture book narrativesto see if they fulfil these criteria. Theydo!

There then follow chapters on earlyconcept books (Kummerling-Meibauerand Meibauer), metaphors in picturebooks (Rau), toilet training picturebooks in Japan (Takashi and Wilkerson)and a chapter by Carole Scott on the ex-tent to which picture books stimulatethe acquisition of visual, musical andlanguage literacies. I particularly likedthe chapter by Cornelia Remi called‘Reading as Playing’, in which shelooked at wimmelbooks. These are de-fined as “wordless picture books whichdisplay a series of panoramas teemingwith an immense number of charactersand details”. The Where’s Willy? serieswould be a good example of the genre.Remi argues that these books allow formany different forms of reading and soencourage a playful active approach. Ithink there is more to explore in this no-tion of ‘reading as play’.

Part Three consists of case studiesof child–book interactions. Nachtigallerand Rohlfing looked at how caregiversstructure their talk to children in dif-ferent book-reading scenarios, asking ifthe content of the book influences theway in which the reader presents in-formation to the child. They found that

Copyright C© 2012 UKLA. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Literacy

2 Reviews

content had little influence on linguisticstructure and concluded that “a goodstoryteller is able to elaborate on anybook content”. Lowe’s paper comesfrom her in-depth work on the read-ing experiences of her two children.She demonstrates how the books them-selves instruct when children are givencontrol of reading sessions. This is alovely confirmation of Meek’s seminaltext, How Texts Teach What Readers Learn.Evans shows how children choose to re-turn to books in which their sense ofself was mirrored and that these booksempowered them to create their owntexts. Finally, Arizpe and Blatt showhow sharing books can support a de-

veloping understanding of feelings andrelationships.

The danger of a strongly interdis-ciplinary volume like this one is thetemptation to the reader to turn to whatis familiar and leave the unknown. Iam glad that I did not do that becauseI discovered riches in this book thatI would not have encountered other-wise. This is a book to come back toand reflect on. It does not offer a lotof practical support to the practitionerbut it does provide food for thoughtand a gateway into new ways of seeingand thinking. Through reading severalpapers in this book, I have been chal-lenged to reconsider my view of books,

and through other papers I found sup-port for long-held beliefs from unex-pected quarters. I would recommendthis book to all who have an interestin emergent literacy. In her introduc-tion, Kummerling-Meibauer states themain aim of this volume as being to“offer fresh insights into the mutualrelationship between emergent literacyand children’s books”. It certainly ful-filled that aim for this reader and, asshe also says, “it is a subject worthwatching”.

Margaret PerkinsUniversity of Reading

Copyright C© 2012 UKLA