The meaning-making in kindergarten children’s visual narrative compositions

During a 10-week classroom-based study in a school in western Canada, 17 Kindergarten children had multiple opportunities to learn about how elements of visual art, design and layout in picturebook artwork are fundamental to meaning-making when transacting with this format of literature. Student application of learning about the concepts under study was explored when the children viewed and discussed wordless or almost wordless picturebooks, and when they created their own artwork or visual compositions. Findings from the content analysis of the Kindergarten children’s visual narrative compositions and individual interviews revealed their understanding of how colour, point of view, framing, line to show action, line to show emotion and implied line can be used purposefully by sign-makers to represent particular meanings. Furthermore, application of Halliday’s metafunctions conceptual framework to analyze three focus students’ visual narrative compositions revealed how their semiotic work concomitantly realized the ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions. Consistent with the tenets of social semiotics and sociocultural theory, the descriptions of the instructional procedures and student activities convey how the practices in the classroom shaped the students’ visual narrative compositions. The findings enrich understanding of how young children’s knowledge of various semiotic resources can enhance their understanding and interpretations of the kinds of communicative functions realized or fulfilled by various meaning-making resources, and can inform the design of their visual compositions.