Young children’s readings of wordless picture books: What’s ‘self’ got to do with it?

To understand difficulties in early literacy most research has focused on print related knowledge. Knowing about print, however, is only one aspect of reading and may neglect how successful early readers also develop capacities to enter the text world and make sense of it through a personal, relational experience. To explore this other aspect of early literacy I examined the wordless picture book readings of 18 children aged 5 and 6 prior to their ability to decode print. Analyses imply that the development of ‘self that reads’ might be described as a process of movement along a continuum over which a complex, flexible, dialogic self-system develops and which then influences the kind and amount of transactional relationship a reader has with a text. Acknowledging the importance of the developing ‘self that reads’ during childhood may deepen definitions of emergent literacy and broaden our approaches to young readers.