Support, Barriers, and Expectations of the Reader: On Textual and Visual Choices in a Picturebook Based on the Animated Feature Film Cars Whenever an animated feature film aimed at children is released from a bigger production company, tie-ins will follow, including picturebooks. These books can be found in everyday grocery stores and have the potential to reach many children. Although discussed, few systematic descriptions of the literature in question exist. In this article, I examine textual and visual choices in the picturebook Bilar (Cars, 2015) based on the Disney & Pixar film with the same name (Lesseter). I investigate what barriers and what support it offers the reader to grip the story, but also whom the book addresses as a reader. The analysis focuses on resources important for comprehension, namely temporality and cohesion. Close-up analysis of text and pictures reveals and tries to explain temporal and logical gaps. The analysis shows that Bilar is quite complex, with features that contribute to distancing the story from the reader. The temporal unfolding advances quickly, but quite evenly, with few pauses. Leaps are drastic and linguistically unmarked, and intentions and events are presented indirectly. The text has few explicit causal ties and deviates from what is expected. Overall, the pictures repeat information in the text, but they also contradict the text in a way that suggests it was unintentional. Although the text manages to mediate the plot and intention – to the adult reader – it is hard to grasp in total without the movie in mind. The addressed reader, then, is plural: an adult and a child who have watched the movie and can fill the gaps, and who do not care too much about logical details. However, the study and the conclusion is based on a traditional view of the book and of reading. An investigation of the book in use might change or widen the understanding of this type of product.

This article presents an edited conversation between Kenneth Hyltenstam, Christopher Stroud, Linus Salö and David Karlander. Its main topic is the rise and consolidation of bilingualism research/multilingualism research as a demarcated subject area in Swedish academe. The article delves into this history via the professional, scholarly trajectories of Hyltenstam and Stroud. By mapping and discussing their involvement in the field of bilingualism/multilingualism, the article offers analytical perspectives on the formation of the field, and on the general atmosphere surrounding this process. The account focuses on past and current research themes, institutional settings and modes of knowledge exchange. The creation of the Centre for Research on Bilingualism at Stockholm University in the 1980s emerges as a significant event in the evolving account of the research area. The conversation also makes clear that the history of bi/multilingualism research encompasses a variety of agents and interests. The subject area maintains mutable connections to numerous other scientific disciplines and is susceptible to various forms of intellectual influence. It has likewise been shaped in relation to various scholarly and societal values and concerns. By clarifying some of these dynamics, the article contributes to the yet-to-be-written history of bi/multilingualism research. It also comments on conversation as a scholarly method, and clarifies the scope and strength of its claims.

Following Halliday and Hasan (1976, Cohesion in English. London: Longman; Halliday and Hasan 1989, Language, context, and text: Aspects of language in a social-semiotic perspective. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press), text can be defined and studied as a united whole. A "text" which does not appear as a united whole can be very hard to understand and describe. Since this kind of text exists for example in the form of student writing, it is important to have methods and models which can handle all kinds of compositionscoherent and clearly structured and the opposite. This article suggests such a model. Relative to available methods, it is beneficial for understanding and comparing many different texts. The model is based on temporal unfolding of texts, realized primarily by tense and Aktionsarten. It uncovers the basic structure of the text and visualizes it -a combination that makes the text accessible for further analysis. Four texts with different structures from the national test in Swedish and Swedish as a second language are used to demonstrate the model. The model is used to discuss and compare the texts and how the students respond to the given instruction. It is shown what information the model reveals and how analysis and information can be added; in this case means for understanding the narrative text.

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