Playing with words and pictures: using post-modernist picture books as a resource with teenage and adult language learners

Post-modernist picturebooks in English have been characterised as children’s books with pictures that subvert literary conventions, manifest complex intertextuality, and communicate multiple meanings leading to open-ended interpretations. Such picture books, including those by Anthony Browne, Shaun Tan and Mimi Grey, while apparently targeted at children, provide a rich resource for developing language and cultural awareness, interpretive strategies and creativity in both teenage and adult learners of English at high school and at university. This chapter begins with a discussion of key features of post-modernist picture books relevant to language learning, with examples given from specific texts. A range of practical activities for exploiting these books in the classroom, as well as with teachers of English in training, is then presented.