ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the practice of using other language picture books with pre-primary children in a foreign language learning context. It demonstrates how children's authentic response to picture books requires recognition of the children's linguistic repertoire as an ever developing resource, during the repeated readings of second language picture books. The chapter refers to an empirical study that follows the interpretative paradigm of qualitative research. Focused research into response to picture books appeared in the 1990s and centred on a need to understand how children created meaning with, and appreciated picture books. Reader response criticism is a literary theory that focuses on the readers and on the meaning they extract from a text. Iser's theories describe an implied reader who is controlled by the text through the use of indeterminacies. Children's responses were observed across all the categories outlined in Sipe's theory of literary understanding, with children responding physically and verbally in both the first and the second languages.
