Narrative style and reading about characters with disabilities: A multimodal approach to exploring children's perspectives

This thesis explores children’s perspectives on books including characters with disabilities and various types of narrators. It investigates the role of the narrator on children’s perspectives on their reading experiences and conceptualisations of disability. It also examines whether or how multimodal research design contributes to exploring children’s responses on children’s literature. The thesis adopts and adapts the Mosaic Approach to explore 8-to 11-year-old children’s multimodal perspectives on three books including characters with disabilities. Oral, written, and arts-based responses of children collected via drawings, posters, postcards, poems, letters, questionnaires, reflection sheets, and focus group interviews were thematically analysed and presented for each book. In addition, it includes three case studies to make an in-depth analysis of individual reader responses. Children’s thoughts and feelings on the research process are also presented. The thesis adopts an interdisciplinary framework to explore children’s responses on reading by giving them many opportunities to participate and be listened to. It also demonstrates how a multimodal approach offers opportunities to explore children’s responses on books. Therefore, this interdisciplinary study draws on the potentials of creating new relationships among various disciplines and fields such as children’s literature, narratology, literacy studies, participatory research, and childhood studies