ABSTRACT
There have been surprisingly few systematic attempts to ask children about their reading/viewing of pictorial text in terms of their understanding of visual art, and appreciation of artistic techniques and their implications for the teaching and learning of visual literacy.1 Most research is limited to particular psychological, linguistic or artistic development issues, where subjects are tested in a context that may not have much in common with the setting in which they relate to pictures. Within the studies that do look at response to pictures in books, few have focussed on the same picturebook and asked the same set of questions to children of different ages and in different schools. Also, few have taken account of the way the child perceives the relationship between images and words.
