As texts become multimodal, even preschool children, although they do not know yet how to read, confront texts in which the way they look contributes to the construction of their meaning. Even without words, just by looking at the text, its form and location, the colours of the letters or the background page, the letter size, or its font, the reader-viewer knows if s/he is going to read a dialogue or a firstperson narration, if the hero shouts or whispers, his/her emotional state, and even his/her language and nationality. Three hundred fifty-six non-reading preschool children were tested on multimodal conventions adopted mainly by comics. The results showed that young children, even before they become print literate, possess a visual literacy that is gaining predominance in our times.KEY WORDS: preschoolers, visual literacy, multimodality, comic books, word images L1 -

No abstract

This critical reading of two nonfiction picturebooks about the Statue of Liberty and Cycladic Figurines shows that these books employ both verbal and visual strategies to establish second-order semiotic symbols as per Barthes' terminology. It observes that the manner in which nonfiction picturebooks communicate information is instrumental in their support of specific ideologies and concludes that the very same strategies that support factual truthfulness also convincingly support ideology.

No abstract

No abstract