A Study Of Preshool Children’s Picture Reading Features With The Picture Books

Picture book reading is an important activity in children’s early reading education,it has an extremely important value for children’s development.A picture book is a book format that combines visual and verbal narratives.For children,to read a picture is more important than to read a text.But after making a relevant literal review,we found that there are very few empirical and systematic researches about how the children read the pictures at home and abroad.In this study,a total of 90 children of Han aged 4-6 years were selected as the research objects and six different picture storybooks were used as study materials.We conduct our study from three aspects.There are the image visual grammar features which were studied from children’s independent reading process,4-6 years old children’s visual development characteristics which were produced while they were reading the pictures and the understanding characteristics of image design meanings.The data collection and statistical analysis were carried out by using multiple research methods such as eye tracking in reading,story telling after reading,page sorting,picture reconstruction,image classification and interview and so on.The results of visual grammar characteristics in children ’s picture book reading process show that,in general,there were some general visual design grammar characteristics in children’s picture book reading process.Children aged 4-6 have the visual ability to capture the design intention of the pictures in picture books.In the process of narrative representation of picture reading,the degree of children’s concern about the images of the actor from the process of narrative behavior and the degree of children’s concern about the phenomenon images in the process of reaction was significantly higher than the goal images which were pointed by the actor and the phenomenon images which the reactor concerned.In the design of image compositional meaning,the children showed different visual characteristics between the left and right,the top and bottom sides of the page.Children pay attention to the right side of the page was significantly higher than the left,the top was significantly higher than the bottom,the center was significantly higher than the margin.In the image salience design,the children’s attention to the images which were maximum or with warm color tinge was significantly higher than those were minimum or with cool color modulation.In the interactive meaning of design the images,the degree of children’s attention to demand images was significantly higher than offered images.Children’s gaze at different focal images showed significant visual characteristics.They were:close-up shot was greater than meddle shot,meddle shot was greater than long shot.Children’s attention characteristics to the horizontal perspective design images presented that positive and lateral attention was significantly higher than the visual characteristics of the back.Children’s attention characteristics to the images which were designed in vertical viewing angle significantly showed that angle of elevation was greater than angle of parallel sight,angle of parallel sight was greater than angle of depressionThe study on the visual development characteristics in the reading process of children aged 4-6 years showed that,in general,visual fixation are basically consistency,but there is a turning characteristics.In the process of children’s visual search for narrative images,the visual search rules of the three age groups were consistent,that was,focusing on the protagonist of the picture and gradually searching the left and right sides of the protagonist.The closer the characterization objects to the protagonist area,the higher the degree of children’s attention.the longer the distance to the protagonist area was,the less attention was paid to it.Children’s reading began with the protagonist(or actor)rather than read from the left side to the right side.During the reading process,the visual search features of children aged 4 and 5 were no difference.For them,the actor area was the first one to search and the goal area was the second one,text area was the third one,non-goal area was the last one.However,the 6-year-old children showed different visual development features.They focus on actor area first,then the text area,goal area and non-goal area.In addition,in the continuous page reading process,with the progress of page reading operated,three age group children all showed a gradual decline to the degree of visual attention.Various forms of visual attention research showed that during the picture books reading of 4-6 year old children,except the prominent composition of the cold and warm colors,three age groups children showed that the attention of cool colors was higher than the warm colors.In the left and right side,the middle,the top and bottom position composition and size salience composition,the three age groups all presented general compositional meaning of image grammar.These characteristics were:the right side is higher than the left,the center is greater than the margin,the top is higher than the low,maximum image is better than the minimum image.However,in the reading of various constitutive images,there was no significant difference for children between the ages of 4-6,and the age effect was not significant.The attention level for composition design image of children in these three age groups were close to each other.Nonetheless,from another perspective,it is found in the study that two types of transition processes are involved in the reading of various forms pictures among the children of 4-6 years old.It is transited from the rise in 4-5 years old to the drop in 5-6 years old,or it falls first in 4-5 years old and then rises in 5-6 years old.To note,the age of five years old is a key turning point.The research showed that the development of visual ability of children aged 4-6 was not raised linearly,continuously and stably,but rather developed in two stages.As was suggested in the eye-tracking studies on various design images of interactive significance in the picture books among the young children aged 4-6,the general significance of interaction design was not fully manifested in the three age groups,and was even contrary to the law in some cases.Specifically,children aged 4-6 displayed the features contrary to the grammar of interactive design in terms of the design images of offer-demand,face forward-face upward,intermediate-long and back-side.In other words,the gazing level of children at the offered images was higher than the demanded images.The gazing level of children at the images that are looked forward at was significantly higher than the images they look upward at,the level of medium focal distance was vastly higher than that of the large focal distance,and the level of backward images was far higher than that of the lateral images.At the same time,the findings also indicated that the fixation level of children of four to six years old had no marked difference in a various interactive design relations.No significance main effect of age was manifested.Children of the three age groups were of similar level when it comes to the fixation level of interactive design images,with consistent fixation law being exhibited.Apart from that,as far as the visual gazing of interactive design images,children aged 4-6 was identified with the two transition phrases and age characteristics in conformity with the constitution design,regardless of any form of interactive designs.Fingdings of research on preschool children’s picture reading comprehension:the understanding level increase gradually along with the growth of the age..As demonstrated by the research on characteristics of 4-6-year-old children’s understanding of image design significance in the process of reading picture books,their understanding on the meaning of the three concepts characterizing and narrating pictures,namely,symbolic,classification and analytical,takes on a tendency of a gradual improvement of understanding on picture’s conceptual meaning with the increasing age.The main effect of age is very notable.For the understanding of picture’s symbolic meaning,children’s understanding of symbolic attributives is generally higher than that of symbolic suggestive.For the understanding of picture’s classification meaning,children’s understanding level is highest in general classification,following by characteristic classification and attribute classification.For the understanding of picture’s analytical meaning,children’s understanding of quantitative topography is higher than that of temporal analytical images on the whole.The research also found that 4-6-year-old children’s understanding of different conceptual meanings showed a gradual and staged growth tendency.Their understanding of picture’s symbolic meaning embraced gradual development while that of the other two conceptual meanings,i.e.,image classification and analysis,shows a staged-growth feature.According to the conclusion of the above research,this paper puts forward an limited advice as a reference to the educators and designers.That is we should pay attention to the use of visual grammar in the design of the pictures,and also should transcend visual design grammar which were based on the purpose of children’s reading education.