ABSTRACT
In the previous three sections we have examined picture books, comic books and film as individual types of media, and we will now consider some of the areas within literacy which can be explored through these visual art forms. The concept of genre is a key part of literacy teaching and an understanding of it enables children to develop not only their own writing, but also their critical and analytical reading skills. Genre is one of the many areas in which visually based texts can be linked to the teaching of the traditional written text so that children can concomitantly develop their knowledge of individual media and of genre itself. On a basic level, a genre is a category or a type. Identifying which genre (or genres) a text belongs to is a means of understanding and classifying it based on its form and content while also relating it to existing texts. Considering how an individual text conforms to or contravenes the traditional rules of its particular genre allows pupils to develop a specialised knowledge of both text and genre and encourages them to make connections between texts. This is as true of visual texts as it is of written ones; as Gillian Rose states, ‘It helps to make sense of the significance of elements of an individual image if you know that some of them recur repeatedly in other images’ (2001: 19). For those pupils who are only just beginning to learn about genre, an examination of how it manifests across film, picture books and comic books can provide a more accessible and memorable way of teaching the subject than exploring it through written texts. For those who already have an understanding of genre in relation to the written text, re-examining the concept through visual texts gives them opportunities to apply their knowledge in different ways.
