ABSTRACT
Fiction is at the heart of English teaching at all ages. The first major works in English to address the form and nature, for example, Ways of the Illustrator by Joseph Schwarcz and Words about Pictures by Perry Nodelman were published and since then there has been a steady increase in the flow of articles, conference papers and book chapters dedicated to the study, criticism and analysis of the picturebook. Picture books are not just books with illustrations, but a recognised art form that combines the verbal and the visual in innovative and often intriguing ways. They flourished in the final decades of the twentieth century and remain a major part of contemporary children's literature. Anthony Browne's The Tunnel, for instance, is used by teachers of children from age seven to eleven. Creators of picture books use a combination of design, illustrations and written text and multimodality in comics and graphic books.
