Appel à contributions: Using English-language Picturebooks to Teach and Learn English from Primary to Secondary School
La revue Textes et Contextes lance un appel à contributions pour son numéro de juin 2027 (22-1), intitulé “Using English-language Picturebooks to Teach and Learn English
from Primary to Secondary School”. Les articles pourront être soumis en français ou en anglais. Les propositions d’une page, incluant une courte bio-bibliographie, devront être soumises aux éditrices (veronique.alexandre@unicaen.fr; christine.colliere-whiteside@u-bourgogne.fr; elise.ouvrard@unicaen.fr) avant le 30 avril 2026.
Children’s literature picturebooks are visual literary works, the narration of which relies on iconography that is essential to the unfolding of the story, its context, or its characters. They are objects to be handled – in fact, the materiality of picturebooks is one of their particularly prominent characteristics (Ouvrard, 2022). Finally, the singular nature of these iconotexts often resides in the dialogic reading they foster: they lend themselves easily to shared reading experiences, whether silently or aloud.
Given that the simultaneous presence of text and images involves two different semiotic codes, reading a picturebook or talking about one requires the cross-activation of two mechanisms: verbal literacy and visual literacy. In the case of wordless picturebooks (such as A Stone for Sascha by Aaron Becker, 2018, or Migrants by Issa Watanabe, 2019, for example), it is the reader who proposes his/her own script and verbalizes it.
Since meaning must necessarily be deployed along two different axes (visual and verbal), the creators of picturebooks, as well as the professionals working in this particular area of publishing, cultivate the art of discrepancy. In 1988, Maurice Sendak, referring to Randolph Caldecott (1846-1886), whom he considers the father of the modern picturebook, used the term “syncopation,” in its musical sense, to define the rhythmic gap that exists between the content of the images and that of the text. Words and pictures are never quite where you expect them to be, they never quite land on the same beat; a surprising, original and fruitful gap exists between them.
The other secret to the construction of picturebooks is the work on details and secret clues. To interpret the meaning or to offer a commentary on what one sees, one must pay attention to anything likely to be visually meaningful, as Serafini explains in Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy (2014) and listen carefully to all the sounds (Orange, Pear, Apple, Bear, Emily Gravett, 2006) It may even involve recognizing the absence of visual and/or oral elements the reader would expect to find, the absence of which becomes significant. The reader is thus trained to perceive and unravel a large bundle of clues,prompting them to reason based on what they have perceived.
Thus, as a short form, sharp and deceivingly simple, the picturebook presents, for each of its published titles, a unique take on a given topic in just a few pages. Today, there are dozens and dozens of picturebooks that deal with a wide range of subjects with conciseness and originality, displaying different artistic techniques, different cultural contents (Burgain, 2018), and varied ways of highlighting language (Partridge Salomon, 2019). In their oral form, picturebooks echo the phonological characteristics of the English language.
A well-chosen picturebook can thus prove to be a highly productive learning medium, enabling numerous linguistic activities around culturally and philosophically rich themes. One of the characteristics of contemporary picturebooks is their ability to engage readers, both young and old, with societal issues (Haaland, Kümmerling-Meibauer, and Ommundsen, 2022) thus allowing the language teacher to work on various objectives relating to citizenship. It is this challenge, rooted in a perspective of literary didactics, that we will be examining in this issue of Textes et Contextes.
Please send a one-page abstract, in French or in English, with a short bio-bibliography, to the editors, (veronique.alexandre@unicaen.fr; christine.colliere-whiteside@u-bourgogne.fr; elise.ouvrard@unicaen.fr) by 30 April 2026. The published articles, once the proposals are accepted, can be written in French or in English.
References:
Bang Molly (2016) [1991]. Picture This : How Pictures Work. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.
Bland Janice (2013). Children’s Literature and Learner Empowerment: Children and Teenagers in English Language Education. London : Bloomsbury.
Burgain Marie-France (2018). Pratiques transfictionnelles en classe de langue à l’école primaire, Recherches en didactique des langues et des cultures, 15-3 [En ligne] (consulté le 20/02/2022).http://journals.openedition.org/rdlc/3644
Haaland, Gunnar, Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina et Ommundsen, Ase (2022). Exploring Challenging Picturebooks in Education. New York: Routledge.
Mourão, Sandie. (2023). The effectiveness of picturebooks for intercultural awareness in foreign language education: A scoping study. Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht, 28(1), 173-209.DOI: https://doi.org/10.48694/zif.3620
Nodelman Perry (2008). The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University.
Ouvrard Elise (2022). The Children’s Illustrated Literature Book in an Elementary School English Session: An Object Considered in its Materiality? in Bisault Joël, Le Bourgeois Roselyne, Thémines Jean-François, Le Mentec Mickaël and Chauvet-Chanoine Céline (dir.), Objects to Learn About and Objects for Learning: Which Teaching Practices for Which Issues? London : ISTE Group, pp. 3-20.
Partridge Salomon Jill Kay (2019) La littérature de jeunesse anglophone dans l’enseignement de l’anglais à l’école primaire, Les Langues Modernes, n° 2, 24-30.
Prince Nathalie et Thiltges Sébastian (dir.) (2018). Eco-Graphies – Ecologie et littératures pour la jeunesse. Presses Universitaires de Rennes.
Rose Gillian (2023) [2006]. Visual Methodologies: an introduction to researching with visual materials (5th edition). London : Thousand Oaks.
Sendak Maurice (1988). Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books and Pictures. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux.
Serafini Frank (2014). Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy. New York : Teacher College Press.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
C.Noûs (23 mars 2026). Appel à contributions: Using English-language Picturebooks to Teach and Learn English from Primary to Secondary School. Le magasin des enfants. Consulté le 20 avril 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/15xbi

