This research focuses on the reading process in which children get engaged when working with picturebooks. We aim to analyze the inferential online reading that occurs while students interpret the meaning of the text and how this process triggers a series of aesthetic experiences that develop in turn emotional competences.
We know many children read to learn and to enjoy. The teaching approach that we propose to work with picturebooks in EFL stems, on the one hand, from Kern’s notion of literacy “as a process of creating and transforming knowledge” (2000, p. 29), and on the other hand, from Rosenblatt (1986) and Dewey’s (1934) understanding of the growth of experience as a key element in aesthetic education (The New London Group, 1996; Cope & Kalantzis, 2009; Menke & Paesani, 2018; Reyes-Torres y Bataller-Català, 2019). Literary and multimodal texts such as picturebooks contain a series of coded messages –language and visual signs–– that English language learners decode as they attempt to comprehend them during the process of reading. This research focuses on such a process with the aim to analyze, first, the inferential online reading that occurs while students interpret the meaning of the text based on their previous experience and knowledge, and second, on how this interaction between reader and literary text provides them with a series of aesthetic experiences that develop in turn emotional competences (Bourg & Stevenson, 1997; Bisquerra, 2009). Our research instruments consist of the teacher-researcher journal; a didactic sequence that includes a wide range of activities (games, puzzles and debates) that support both student interaction with the text and interaction among students (Paran, 2008); a questionnaire designed by González & Berastegui (2008), members of GROP (Grup de Recerca en Orientació Psicopedagógica, Universitat de Barcelona); and a range of different data collected from students’ work. As will be shown, the results obtained demonstrate that learners create an enriching mental scheme due to the opportunities to articulate and express the inferences during reading. Likewise, it is possible to observe a gradual development of the five emotional competences: emotional conscience, emotional regulation, self-management, life skills and subjective well-being.
