Author Description

We live at a time when traditional ideas of the book are being challenged by new technology that places greater emphasis on visual and spoken communication. The classical printed book is giving way to the more schematic and graphic arrangements of web-pages, advertisements and multimodal publications. Learning to read and write in this new environment presents new challenges. Children's picture books provide a useful way of exploring how these changes are taking place. Looking closely at how picture books succeed in combining words (text) and pictures apprentices students into reading and producing multimodal texts. Words & Pictures traces the historical development of picture books, examines the way stories are told through both text and pictures and explores some of the major themes which feature in picture books. It provides frameworks for analysing picture books and a range of activities for the classroom.