Emergent Literacy: Children’s Books from 0 to 3 (review)

Assessing what young children, from ages 10 months to three years, learn from picture book experiences—looking at the illustrations, listening to and talking around the story with an adult—is not an easy task. The obvious reason for this difficulty is that young children cannot articulate themselves, or at least not fully, and so it is exceptionally difficult to gather and interpret data from them. But there is another reason as well: historically, children’s literature academics have not considered the study of literature for children three years of age and younger to be useful. These books have not been categorized seriously because they have little or no written text, and, as a result, their place in contributing to children’s literacy has been greatly overlooked. Emergent Literacy remedies this problem.

A pioneer in its field, this book is a compilation of revised papers presented at an international conference that was held at the Picture Book Museum (Burg Wissem) in Troisdorf, Germany in March 2009. The conference brought together a wide range of scholars from various countries and fields, all of whom were looking at the impact of literature on children ages 10 months to three years on literacy, language acquisition, and cognitive, linguistic and aesthetic development. It was also the first conference to focus on multidisciplinary approaches to studying this field.

Emergent Literacy is divided into three sections. Part One explores fundamental issues of early literacy, such as color perception and basic illustration design and layout. Part Two explores the types of picture books that are aimed toward children under three years of age. This wide range of literature includes early-concept books, wimmelbooks, and “teaching” picture books (which expose this age set to behavioral norms.) Finally, Part Three explores the interaction between the adult reader, the child watcher/listener, and the book itself. Linguistic development in bilingual children, the impact of the way mothers interact with a text, and the ways play and talk are woven together with texts are examined here.

The book is a collection of individual papers, each written by a different author, and the quality of the contributions is somewhat uneven, especially in terms of readability. For example, chapter three, “Color Perception in Infants and Young Children,” an in-depth study of the development of color vision in young children and the significance of color in picture books, is quite dense and somewhat challenging to follow, while chapter twelve, “Don’t Tell Me All About It—Just Read It to Me,” a chronicle of the author’s daughters’ early reading experiences, is anecdotal, informal, and its analysis is clear. Kümmerling-Meibauer offers the following advice on how to navigate the book: “The reader is invited to follow the trail according to her interests.” And this is good advice. While the chapters are interconnected, a reader can gain much valuable and new information by reading any one of the chapters, or reading them in any order.

That being said, the sum of the book paints a whole and multifaceted view of the importance of young children’s literature. Some highlights include an examination of narrative picture books for young children and how to choose the best ones, an in-depth (and somewhat humorous) look at toilet training picture books in Japan, and a thorough analysis of the way picture book metaphors provide young children with a way to understand and express abstract ideas. Ultimately, Emergent Literacy is well worth the read. It is a revolutionary study of the many different ways that these picture books are critical to young children’s developing literacy and their growing sense of themselves as individuals in the world.