Dr. Riama Maslan Sihombing, M.Sn.
Picture children's books are media to improve multimodal literacy skills through text and illustrations. Illustration, as a visual narrative, becomes a media writer and illustrator to convey certain meanings. Picture books can be a medium to improve child visual literacy skills through understanding of typographic variations, text size, color composition, perspectivity, and depiction of figures (Bearne & Woltenscroft, 2007). Furthermore Bearne & Woltenscroft (2007) mentions that by understanding pictorial books, children can be accustomed to evaluate multimodal literacy, namely whether the presentation through text or images in conveying certain goals effectively. Picture books can also improve child analytical skills. For example, they can analyze whether text and illustrations complement each other and develop stories with aligned (Arizpe, 2002). This visual understanding will then form their visual communication, which eventually enables them to communicate using visual narratives. Research on children's response to visual narratives, in this case illustration, in illustrated books (Arizpe, 2002; Bearne & Woltenscroft, 2007; Evans, 2015; Pantaleo, 2016; Styles & Arizpe, 2009) Providing the seriousness of researchers in developed countries such as The United States, Australia and Britain, in an effort to develop visual literacy skills since basic education. This seriousness proves that the book of pictorial children acts as a semiotic space where visual narratives, as well as written text, has language in the form of visual elections à ¢ â,¬â € œ form, color composition, motion, among many other aspects à ¢ â,¬â € œFishing the idea of the maker (KRESS & LEUWEEN, 2001; Painter, 2013). Analysis of semiotics in children's books has been carried out in a gender and cultural perspective (Sihombing, 2014). However, children's response to visual narratives in pictorial children's books has not been explored empirically. This research aims to analyze children's response to visual narratives in pictorial books that display typical Indonesian illustrations. This research is important to record children's response rooted in the context of habits, understanding and visual experiences of Indonesian children against illustration style which raises the distinctiveness of culture in their development environment. By raising this typical Indonesian contextual approach, this research is expected to contribute to visual literacy research which is currently carried out by researchers in many countries as the rampant awareness of the importance of the role of visual literacy skills in the modern era.
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