Reading aloud as performance and its representation on television programmes for children

ABSTRACT

The social practice of reading aloud picture books to children, or shared reading, has been represented on many televisions programmes broadcast across English-speaking countries. This article views shared reading as a performance, and explores its transformation on two television shows for children and the potential of such shows to promote reading engagement and literacy development. Taking a critical multimodal perspective, we analyse shared reading in real life and on television as a social practice, focusing on the ways the participants talk about the picture book, relate it to exterior texts or activities, and legitimise shared reading through the employment of multimodal and interactive strategies. The analysis reveals significant differences between actual adult–child shared reading and its representation on television. The comparison illustrates the potential benefits and limitations of television shows in which picture books are read to the viewer, in terms of promoting shared reading among families and supporting young children’s emergent literacy development.

KEYWORDS:

• Shared reading
• social practice
• television programmes for children
• performance studies
• multimodality
• critical multimodal discourse analysis

Acknowledgements

The authors’ thanks go to the children and mothers who participated in the shared reading recording. They also express their gratitude to Cressida Cowell and Neal Layton for giving permission to reprint the illustrations from their picture book That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown. Kunkun Zhang is currently supported for his PhD study by a CSC-MQ scholarship cofounded by China Scholarship Council and Macquarie University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Kunkun Zhang is a PhD candidate at the Department of Educational Studies, Macquarie University, Australia. His research interests include linguistics, multimodality, social semiotics, discourse analysis, and children’s language, literature and literacy. His PhD thesis explores the multimodal representation of picture books and book reading on television.

Emilia Djonov is a Lecturer at the Department of Educational Studies, Macquarie University, Australia. Her research interests and publications are in the areas of (critical) multimodal and hypermedia discourse analysis, social semiotics, visual communication, multimodal learning and multiliteracies education. She has published in journals such as Visual Communication, Semiotica, Social Semiotics, and Text & Talk, and coedited the volume Critical Multimodal Studies of Popular Discourse (Routledge, 2014, with Sumin Zhao).

Jane Torr is an honorary Associate Professor at the Department of Educational Studies, Macquarie University, Australia. Her research interests include children’s early language and emergent literacy development, children’s responses to picture books, and educator-child talk in long day care nurseries. She has published in journals such as Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, Early Child Research Quarterly and Early Childhood Education Journal.

Notes

1. The television programmes also employ other strategies in representing the generic structure, for example, drawing upon semiotic resources such as animation, music and sound effect (Zhang, Djonov, and Torr 2016). In this article, we only focus on the strategies used by the presenters/performers who read or tell the story.