Reading in the 21st century has become something that entails not only decoding written symbols but also integrating these with interpreting visual and moving images. These complex, often multimodal, texts have been termed icontexts (Wagner, 1997).  Through the iconotext the author invites the child (and sometimes the adult) reader in to play. In reading these sorts of texts children need very actively to make meaning and draw on a wide range of reading skills they are developing in other domains of literacy, such as computer games and interactive web-based texts.

Our research examines picturebooks as iconotext and in this we draw on Wagner’s (1997) definition and that of other writers (Nikolajeva and Scott, 2001; Nikolajeva 2008; Kress and van Leeuwen, 2003). Picturebooks as iconotexts existed before some of the recent technological advances, which children and young people currently are mastering, when they read. But in reading picture books now children use their knowledge of the Internet, television, games, digital books, text messaging, as well as their individual lived experience in their physical surroundings.

The focus of the present research is that of picturebooks as iconotexts (Arizpe, 2010 and Arizpe and Styles, 2003), where the child’s response can draw on these other modalities. Our project is a research collaboration between researchers in Norway and the UK on children’s reading across these two cultures. Our main research question is:

How do children from different cultures interpret the iconotext of contemporary picture books?

This paper examines the data to explore the following research objectives:

the nature of the children’s playfulness as readers of the two texts; and

which aspects are culturally- specific responses.

The contribution of the current project is that it is qualitative, small-scale and focused in its structure, while aiming to take a European perspective on reading by comparing young people's responses in Norway and the UK in the relatively informal setting of after-school clubs or out-of-classroom settings. The project, as a whole, is designed as a theory building and ideas exchange between the research team, who are a multinational group, and also as a comparative study of children's reading responses in two countries.  

The team of four researchers, two from Norway and two from the UK, initially exchanged readings of picture books and built theory about how these iconotexts work. Then, children in each country were asked their response to the same selection of picture books to explore how they interpreted them as iconotexts. For this paper, we take from our data set the children’s responses to two particular tasks; first, their drawing responses and what they say about these on their first encounter with both books and second, their oral response to a text marking exercise on each book.  We analyse these data to find out how the children join in the game of meaning making and, in so doing, identify any culture-specific responses.

Arizpe, E. (2010) 'All this book is about books': Picturebooks, Culture, and Metaliterary Awareness. In New Directions in Picturebook Research, Colomer, T., Kummerling-Meibauer, B. and Silva Diaz, C. (eds). London: Routledge, 69 - 82. Arizpe, E. and Styles, M. (2003) Children Reading Pictures: Interpreting visual texts. London: Routledge. Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (2006) Reading images. The grammar of visual design. Second edition. London and New York: Routledge Nikolajeva, M. (2008) Play and playfulness in postmodern picturebooks, in: Postmodern picturebooks: Play, parody, and self-referentiality, ed Lawrence Sipe, New York, Routledge. Nikolajeva, M, and Scott, C. (2001) How picturebooks work. New York: Routledge Paperback edition (published in paperback 2006) Wagner, P. (1997). Reading Iconotexts: From Swift to the French Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.