Formar Leitores para Ler o Mundo - Leitura Gulbenkian - Fundação ...

42
book itself rather than their own purpose-setting questions. Very little
empirical research has been conducted on this method of introducing
and beginning a picture storybook readaloud with young children.
Although it may be a more common approach for the teacher to ask purpose-setting
questions in order to explicitly activate background knowledge,
it may be the case that discussion of the peritextual features of picture
storybooks serves as an equally valid introduction to the story: in
other words, teachers may want to consider «trusting the book» – particularly
the peritext – to be its own best prelude to set the stage for richly
interpreting the story. Foregrounding children’s own ideas from the very
beginning of the discussion may result in validating their interpretive
trajectories rather than subordinating them to predetermined teacher
purposes. Researchers and practitioners who are concerned with the literary
and literacy development of young children may find this
approach to be an intriguing alternative. This study demonstrates young
children’s abilities to conceptualize picture storybooks as aesthetic wholes;
that is, to integrate their knowledge of the various parts of the picturebook
in order to construct coherent and cohesive interpretations. This integration
results in rich and aesthetically powerful literary understanding.
Study #2
Children Use Page Breaks in Their Meaning-Making
In stark contrast to a novel, where the page breaks come arbitrarily
(Mackey 2001), a picturebook, which contains a much smaller set of
words than a novel, is arranged very carefully as a series of facing pages,
called «doublespreads» or «page openings» (Doonan 1993, p. 83), and the
text of the whole picturebook has been carefully broken into a series of
these facing pages. Good readers pay attention to how the words and
accompanying illustrations on one set of facing pages relate to the next
set of words and illustrations on the following doublespread. The page
turns in a picturebook, also known as page breaks, thus have a complex
semiotic significance (Sipe 1998a). A picturebook is not only a slow motion
series of presented verbal and visual images; the brief hiatus as we
turn the page can be used meaningfully by the author and/or illustrator
in various ways.
I examined how 6 and 7 year-olds made meaning out of the page breaks
of several picturebooks so as to construct a sensible and seamless narrative.
Neither picturebook theory nor empirical research on children’s
responses to picturebooks addresses this aspect of picturebooks in any
detail. However, several theoretical concepts can be drawn together to
form a framework for the study. First, in Barbara Bader’s (1976) memorable
phrase, we experience «the drama of the turning of the page» (p. 1)
in a picturebook, as we proceed from one set of facing pages to the next.
For Bader, then, the page turn represents a moment of anticipation, puzzlement,
or confusion, which is then resolved upon turning to the next
set of facing pages. There is a break or gap between turning the page from
one spread to the next, and this gap often requires a high degree of critical
and inferential thinking. This is all up to the reader, because the
reader supplies something that is literally not there. According to Iser
(1978), every text has «gaps» or indeterminacies, which the reader must
fill in as he/she reads. In a picturebook, the page breaks suggest clearly
identifiable gaps for all readers to puzzle over and interpret, gaps that
are sometimes large or quite small.
However large or small, though, there is always at least a slight rift, fissure,
or «aporia» (blind spot of uncertainty) (Derrida 1993) in the verbal
and visual narrative when a page is turned. For this reason, we theorize
that page breaks may be a rich site for investigating children’s cognitive
integration of text and pictures, as well as their resolution of the gaps or
indeterminacies (Iser 1978) in the «imagetext» (Mitchell 1994). The illustrator
and author have only a small number of opportunities to tell the
story. Therefore, the page breaks constitute some of the major gaps in the
text. The illustrator and author must choose carefully what will be illustrated/written
and what will be omitted. Another way of conceiving page
breaks is forwarded by Bartow (2007), who suggests that they are liminal
spaces (Turner, 1969), in which readers find themselves neither in the
familiar context created by the imagetext of one doublespread, nor in the
imagetext of the next doublespread: they are spaces «between».
Barthes (1974) calls texts requiring much involvement and activity from
the reader «writerly texts», in which the reader must act as the writer of
the texts. Clearly, in the turning of the picturebook pages, readers are
forced into this «writerly» mode.
Author/illustrator Brian Selznick, in his acceptance speech for the 2008
Caldecott Medal, states that «…the secret [for conceptualizing The Invention
of Hugo Cabret] was in the page turns… Only the reader turning the page
can move the story forward» (p. 403). Selznick also quotes from an unpublished
essay by illustrator Remy Charlip: «A thrilling picturebook not
only makes beautiful single images or sequential images, but also allows
us to become aware of a book’s unique physical structure by bringing our
attention, once again, to that momentous moment: the turning of the
page» (pp. 403-404).
However, although picturebook designers, illustrators, and authors often
talk about the importance of page breaks, the standard comprehensive texts
on picturebooks (Kiefer 1995; Lewis 200; Nikolajeva & Scott 2001; Nodelman
1988; Stewig 1995) mention them only in passing, and there is no empirical
research we could discover that focuses specifically on children’s interpretations
of page breaks, though it seems an intriguing topic for investigation.
43