Shared reading of wordless picturebooks in bilingual families: Exploring its potential to promote young children’s bilingualism and multimodal literacy

This doctoral project aims to extend our currently limited knowledge about how young children’s families and educators can foster linguistic diversity alongside multimodal literacy, that is, the ability to create and interpret meanings constructed through language, images and other communication skills. To achieve this, the project employs the concept of ‘translanguaging’ and ‘multimodality’, and examines how 15 Chinese-English bilingual parents read and talked about wordless picturebooks with their 4-to-5-year-old children and the potential of these interactions to support children’s multilingualism and multimodal literacy. The research findings have implications for parents, educators, children’s book authors and publishers.