Picturebooks as visual literacy: The influence of illustrations on second-graders' comprehension of narrative text

Abstract

This study poses the following research question: "How does change in text type as text contains more illustrations and fewer words influence second-graders' comprehension of narrative text?" Eleven second-graders read three texts each and completed a series of oral reading comprehension tasks. The three text types varied in terms of the proportion of words to illustrations available in the text: written-only text, combination of written and illustrated text, and illustration-only text. The researcher interviewed each participant three times, once for each text type. Participant scores from the retelling and comprehension questions portion of the interview were analyzed in addition to participant's responses to the retrospective think aloud portion of the interview. Quantitative results from the retellings and comprehension questions suggest an overall trend indicating that illustrations have a positive effect on second grader's comprehension. Qualitative data for individual participants from their retrospective think alouds confirm this trend.