Teaching English With Picturebooks

¶ … Picture Book Is Worth More Than a Thousand Words: Teaching ESL Students

The use of picture books to teach English as a second language has been demonstrated to be quite successful. Experts in literacy attribute this to the way that pictures in the books help to fill in gaps in meaning. A fundamental consideration is that if the picture books are to be used as an aide to teaching English, cultural differences must not be too great, or else the cultural differences must be a primary topic of the story. Indeed, some experts consider texts that are highly culturally specific, and are "intertextually and intervisuablly rich," are not translatable since they are too rooted in a specific locale.

Intervisuality refers to the ease with which a concept can be viewed from a variety of different media. Intertextuality refers to the interrelationship between works of literature with regard to the way that the texts differ and how they influence or reflect one another (Desmet, 2001). However, picture books are especially translatable because the readers of the original text can use the pictures to assist with the translation by using explicit strategies, including: Substitution for intertexts that are not likely to be known by the ELS student; literal translation for shared intertexts, and addition or compensation.

Three picture books have been shown to be quite successfully translated for use with children whose first language is not English: 1) The Jolly Postman books by Janet and Allan Ahlberg; 2) Pete the Cat books, written by Eric Litwin and illustrated by James Dean, and 3) the Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle (a bi-lingual book written in Arabic and English by Language Lizard). The Jolly Postman books are full of surprises, including pages that are envelopes containing various letters. Not all of the Ahlberg books are interactive in this way, but they all contain simple, colorful illustrations that depict fun stories common to children's experience. The Pete the Cat stories all show Pete solving a problem or coping with some unexpected event, such as soiling his white tennis shoes in various colors as he walks around the neighborhood. Young children love the text repetition throughout the book, and the words are repeated in the accompanying songs. Some of the Pete the Cat books are available in interactive tablet format as well as print, and each book is accompanied by a song that can generally be accessed online or through a purchased CD. The Very Hungry Caterpillar is an interactive book for very young children. The text is simple and perfectly matches the illustrations. This is one of Eric Carle's most beloved books that joyously explains the life cycle of butterflies.

Critical Questions: