Australian University Students Reading Francophone Picturebooks—An Original Study

Research on picturebooks and language and culture learning at tertiary level is rare. This article is concerned with how Australian students perceive French and Francophone children’s literature when it is used as a medium for university-level language and cultural studies. The emphasis is on the nature and depth of the students’ developing perception of the literature within the broader spectrum of language learning and cultural study. Questionnaires were administered before and after the semester of study to observe if any shift had taken place in the students’ notion of children’s literature and picturebooks and their perception of the books read in class. The answers were subjected to content analysis (Patton 463), allowing identification of patterns. In this article, I first detail the criteria governing the choice of picturebooks for mature language learners and then turn to their answers to the questionnaires. Finally, I compare the results of this analysis with those obtained from the analysis of students’ productions to confirm or not confirm our original results. I show in the conclusion that the picturebooks chosen with my established criteria were well received by the adult language learners and that their opinion of these books had changed in ways that suggested they had gained over the course of the study a better understanding of some of the characteristic features of contemporary French and Francophone children’s literature.