Jones, Sally Ann

Pictures, as well as written discourse, convey meanings. However, the capacity of visuals as meaning making resource is often overlooked such that visuals in picture books are not given significant attention. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore visual and discourse interaction, specifically in children’s picture books by Anthony Browne. Visual literacy was adopted for visual analysis while critical literacy was adopted for discourse analysis. The findings indicated that the visuals in Anthony Browne’s children’s picture books convey meanings that can either support or contradict its accompanying discourse.

This study, situated in a multilingual, English-medium educational context, draws on theory from mathematics and language education to capture teachers’ perspectives on the place of language in their mathematics pedagogy. The benchmark study explored this topic through surveying and interviewing teachers. Additionally, it sought to relate teacher’s views to their practice by focusing on observing three teachers’ mathematics lessons at primary one, three, and five. Findings are that mathematics teachers placed importance on teaching language, being specifically concerned with language as input and comprehension. They taught vocabulary and reading skills in supportive ways explicitly yet differently at the three grade levels. Particularly at the lower levels, teachers contextualized language in the concrete examples employed for mathematics teaching. At all three levels, prominence was given to teaching pupils how to read word problems as well as how to solve them. However, at primary three, a tension was observed between the two aims of teaching mathematical vocabulary and teaching the reading skills for word problems. This paper illustrates the tension and discusses its possible causes.

The example cases were analyzed using assessment for learning (AfL) strategies: a running record of one child’s reading was examined while the other child’s writing was assessed applying frameworks of writing and spelling development on a writing analysis chart. The analyses suggest the influence of each child’s dominant home language and the colloquial variety of English on their learning to read and write the English of school. The study also implies a misalignment between the children’s language and that expected by the materials and tasks used; due to this, the inbuilt scaffolding of the materials did not appear to provide the children with language support. The paper argues that this kind of detailed scrutiny of individual language use, through the application of AfL techniques and contrastive linguistics, provides rich, diagnostic information about the literacy development of individual children and has yet broader implications for pedagogy. The analyses suggest that the deployment of guided pedagogies in teaching young children would enable the effective use of diagnostic information from AfL procedures and the application of contextually appropriate cross-linguistic instructional strategies.