1. Introduction 2. Language and gender: issues and applications 3. Linguistic analysis: studies of language and gender in fiction' 4. Happily ever after?: fairytale protagonists and feminist fairytales 5. Content analyses and non-sexist guidelines: the early days 6. Fifty years of reading schemes 7. Two-mum and two-dad picture books 8. 'Achronological intertextuality' and Louis Sachar's Holes 9. Harry, Hermione and gender relations at Hogwarts 10. Conclusion and suggestions for further research Bibliography Index.

Language, Gender and Children's Fiction

Encore meconnus en France, les travaux portant sur les apprentissages et les pratiques precoces de la litteratie constituent un champ scientifique en plein essor au sein des communautes de recherche anglophones. Ce nouvel espace pluridisciplinaire de recherches est ne d’une remise en cause des conceptions traditionnelles des premiers apprentissages de la lecture, et plus generalement du developpement langagier : il a ete construit a partir de l’hypothese selon laquelle, des leurs premieres annees, les enfants donnent du sens aux ecrits qui les environnent, avant meme que leurs usages conventionnels ne leur soient systematiquement enseignes a l’ecole elementaire. Pour qui cherche encore a approfondir la connaissance des ressorts a la fois cognitifs et socio-culturels de la production des inegalites d’apprentissage scolaire, certaines des pistes explicatives explorees dans cette litterature presentent un interet majeur dans la mesure ou elles permettent de mieux comprendre l’inegale rentabilite scolaire des premieres socialisations a l’ecrit. C’est a partir de ce point de vue que cette note de synthese presente quelques grandes lignes de developpement de ce champ de recherches, qui ont ete retracees selon differentes theorisations possibles de la notion de litteratie (ensemble de connaissances/de pratiques/d’objets de l’ecrit).

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La littératie précoce. Ce que les enfants font avec l'écrit avant qu'il ne leur soit enseigné

This study explores distinct levels of meaning from images of picture books perceived by 3- to 5-year-old children and investigates how the certain visual perception factors influence children's meaning making and if these factors are correlated. The literature review supports associations among visual perception, information, picture books, meaning, and children. Visual perception serves as the first channel that filters and interprets visual information, and picture books provide visual and verbal experience for children, who constantly search for meaning. Children age 3 to 5 years are potential users of picture books because pictorial information is considered useful to children's learning tasks. Previous research reveals that various factors influence visual perception, and meaning has been mostly associated with its semantic significance in information retrieval. In information science, little research has focused on young children's own way of categorizing information, especially visual information. In order to investigate the distinct levels of meaning perceived by children, the investigation employed both qualitative and quantitative methods including unobtrusive and participant observation, factor analysis, content analysis, and case study. The result of this study contributes to understanding the cognitive process of children related to visual literacy and their interpreting visual information in a digital environment.

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Visual perception in relation to levels of meaning for children: An exploratory study.

The environmental problems, such as global warming, urban air pollution, water scarcity, environmental noise, and biodiversity loss, are all rooted in human behaviors (DuNann Winter & Koger, 2004; Gardner & Stern, 2002; Vlek & Steg, 2007). Thus, the changes in environmental concepts and facilitation of environmentally-friendly behaviors are necessary in order to reduce the impact on environment. The advancement of technological efficiency, such as energy-saving appliances, home insulation, and water-saving equipment, tended to be overtaken by consumption growth (Midden, Kaiser, & McCalley, 2007). In order to cope with an increasingly diversified society, schools and families play a definite role in cultivating our future citizens (Hoosain & Salili, 2010; Knoester, 2012; Sleeter & Soriano, 2012; Wee, Harbor, & Shepardson, 2006). In consideration of environmental instability and global environmental degradation, greater attention should be paid to environmental education (EE) (Blanchet-Cohen & Reilly, 2013; Sauvé, 2009b), thereby creating and maintaining a sustainable relationship between humans and the environment. Therefore, EE has become an international pedagogic trend (Hamzah, 2008; Pizmony-Levy, 2011; Ravindranath, 2007; Wood, 1989).

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The influence of parental education on the environmental education of pre-schoolers: a case study of self-designed picture book

Levels of meaning and children: An exploratory study of picture books' illustrations

Imagine a discourse between the arts in which the conventions of what we might call "ordinary" cognition do not apply, on a site of intense lobbying neither tethered by history or cultural integrity, nor, frequently, concerned with social cohesion or communicative norms. It will be a discourse in which the categories of an imperial culture are abrogated (however temporarily) by an "indigenous" one, yet it will undoubtedly also be a site of intense "colonization." On it, likewise, there will be an appropriation of language on an unprecedented scale. Past experience will play little part. Memory is short and episodic, rather than semantic. It is a primal discourse. Primal in that it is the site of first contact. Primal also in that it is most often considered to be the meeting of a primitive culture and an advanced. Primal, likewise, in a behavioral sense: in it, the satisfaction of physiological needs is tantamount. Indeed, body and mind here are in a state of kinetic unrest. This is a scene of prolonged immat urity, yet ontological and epistemological questions held in a private language are encouraged to be made public. Here the verbal arts have no canon. Literature has no prevailing cultural standard of merit. Questions of the popular and the high cultural are not naturalized and the fictional and nonfictional carry the same degree of verisimilitude as works of propaganda, rhetoric, and didacticism. In modem times, the West has become the site of this tenacious yet frequently unacknowledged imperial discourse, the discourse between multifarious forms of artistic representation to win the attention of children. It is in such a discourse that the picture book is located. 1 Arguing the need for a critical language for the discussion of children's picture books, Peter Hunt suggests that "to force pictures into the same mould as words seems to be potentially unproductive, except in terms of establishing conventions, when, of course, it is, by definition, necessary" (181). It is impossible, however, to conventionalize pictorial representation to the same degree as linguistic representation. Linguistic systems are mastered painstakingly, piece by piece, referent by referent, word by word. Pictorial systems, by contrast, are mastered all at once; they involve what Flint Schier has called "natural generativity" and are therefore much less conventional than linguistic systems. Each system, nevertheless, relies on general agreement and on a willingness to engage in communicative activity: the pictorial system on deep recognitional capacities that link object and its picture, the linguistic system on lexical and syntactical regularities and rules. In the media-saturated culture of the contemporary West, the commonalities and differences of our separate but shared experiences are frequently offered up in a televisual or hypertextual format in which what Hunt describes as "force" is a set of discursive practices that address and interpellate both adults and children as potential viewers or listeners. The linguistic and the pictorial are frequently experienced as synergistic or polylogic systems bound up in this mass media, a media whose intention, according to Jean Baudrillard, is to transcribe the complexity of contemporary life into an ongoing procession of meaningless simulacra, a hyperreal, "a real without origin or reality" (2). Baudrillard's disenchanted vision of postmodernity, articulated most profoundly in the late 1970s and 1980s, produced an interesting ontological metaphor. "Disneyland," he claimed, "is there to conceal the fact that it is the 'real' country, all of 'real' America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social, in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation" (25). …

Graeme Harper

Papers

Enfranchising the Child: Picture Books, Primacy, and Discourse