The focus of this paper is on the exploration of the nature of the picture story book event from a semiotic perspective. One purpose of the study was to examine how pictures and words relate in picture books. A second purpose was to explore how one picture story book was constructed during teacher-student-text interaction in a second-grade classroom. The classroom event involved an oral reading and discussion of the text, interpretations of the main character's traits, letters to the author, and illustrations of dream worlds. The picture book was viewed as a potential text in terms of verbal, visual, and performance cues and as a realized text in terms of students' interpretations. The inquiry illustrates the value of semiotic theory for providing insights into the nature of text and text events.
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