A Question of Talk: Young Children Reading Pictures

In a literacy curriculum that has become increasingly prescriptive in recent times, there seems to be little room for recognising and valuing children’s skills in reading visual texts. Pictures offer equality of access to texts for all children, and provide an effective medium for promoting discussion and reflection. In this article, children clearly demonstrate that they are able to develop skills of metacogniton through talking about a pictorial text. Encouraged to talk not only about what they have read, but how they have read it, children as young as 6 are clearly able to demonstrate their understandings of the reading process.