Bilingual synergies: The aesthetic complexities of bilingual picturebooks and their impact on pedagogic potential

Socio-political developments over the last several decades such as the institution of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989, the twin forces of globalisation and migration and the concomitant shifts in epistemological standpoints concerning the very notions of language and culture have invited a steadily growing flow of academic engagement with multicultural children’s literature. This is reflected by increased scholarly attention towards bilingual picturebooks within the contexts of second language and bilingual language acquisition and literacy development, home-school connection in multilingual communities, and language preservation, revitalisation and maintenance (for e.g. Sneddon, 2009; Hadaway & Young, 2014; Daly, 2016). These studies, among several others, underscore the immense pedagogic potential of bilingual picturebooks. However, current academic discourse on the topic is largely driven by the instrumental value of bilingual picturebooks in various social and educational contexts. This presentation therefore focuses on the intrinsic iconotextual complexities of bilingual picturebooks and theoretically examines their impact on the role of the reader, and – by extension – on the pedagogic potential of bilingual picturebooks. It is argued that the iconotextual complexities of bilingual picturebooks lead to the creation of a translanguaging space in which the reader is invited to mobilise her single linguistic-semiotic repertoire to engage in the process of transmediation for meaning-making. This presentation further demonstrates how the particular nature of bilingual picturebooks as a translanguaging space compounds the “generative power of transmediation” (Siegel, 1995). To this end, the presentation primarily draws upon the work of Sipe (1998), García and Li Wei (2014), and Baynham and Lee (2019).