Analysis Of The Article 'The Pictures Can Say More Things'

For my journal talk assignment, I read “The Pictures Can Say More Things”: Change Across Time in Young Children’s References to Images and Words During Text Discussion by Maren Aukerman and Lorien Chambers Schuldt. The article’s purpose is to analyze how children reference images from a young age as opposed to how they reference linguistic content to comprehend meaning in the books they read. This research was conducted because many researches worry that “children’s attention to images might derail their comprehension of linguistic content by moving the children toward interpretations in conflict with the words” (Aukerman & Schuldt, 2016, p. 269). The article follows an urban second grade Spanish English bilingual classroom throughout the year

Additionally, the teacher used a dialogically organized discussion while many other teachers prefer different methods of teaching, so it is hard to connect the results of one study to all classrooms. I did think it was cool to use a mainly Spanish speaking classroom because readers can really see how heavily they relied on the images before they were able to read and how by the end of the year, they were reading and analyzing the linguistic content. Although there were some flaws in how the authors carried out the research they provided a lot of data such as graphs that showed how much students participated in the beginning versus the end of the year related to different texts and if it was image related or not, how students increased in asking meaningful questions and commenting about the linguistic content throughout the year, and differences in references for the more proficient decoders versus the less proficient decoders. Overall, I thought the study was carried out in a very specific way where the researchers recorded every “utterance to be able to identify the relative frequency of individual moves related to images and linguistic content” (Aukerman & Schuldt, 2016, p.

The research concluded that students later in their education become more aware of linguistic content and are able to comprehend it much easier if they are encouraged to use images at a younger age. Not discouraging the use of images in the classrooms also allows students who might be less proficient decoders to be more confident in participating in the discussion. Although, images should not be the only aspect of the text being analyzed and teachers should be inviting students to “engage with the fullness of multimodality in the text” (Aukerman & Schuldt, 2016, p. 285). Teachers could easily incorporate multimodal learning in the classroom with limited resources other than the texts. The article also mentions how developing a classroom ethos where students can respond to one another respectfully even when they have conflicting ideas is really important for students to engage in meaningful discussion about the text. I do believe that these finding are believable and could be used in future research, but I am aware that the sample size was very small and specific. It does, however, relate to students who I may end up teaching which are ELL, urban, at-risk students so the findings of the study are very applicable to me. I hope to be able to not only rely on text when teaching my students, but also be able to encourage students to use the different resources they have to help them learn to the best of their