International study of immigrant children's responses to award-winning picturebooks and the implications for teaching multilingual and second language learners using visual strategies.

Winner of the Literacy Research Association’s 2015 Edward B. Fry Book Award Immigration is an ongoing, global phenomenon and schools and teachers in host countries must continually find new ways of working with the increasing numbers of immigrant pupils, including refugees and asylum seekers. Language and literacy are crucial for inclusion in a new context but these must be developed in spaces where these children feel safe to explore themes that resonate with their experiences; to express their understanding and to engage in intercultural exchange. Visual Journeys Through Wordless Narratives presents the exploration of response strategies to Shaun Tan's The Arrival. The inquiry was carried out in educational settings, with children from many different parts of the world, in four host countries: the UK, Spain, Italy and the USA. The findings reveal the benefits of using wordless narratives such as picturebooks and graphic novels together with visual strategies to support immigrant children’s literary understandings and visual literacy. They also reveal the wealth of experiences the children bring with them which have the potential to transform educational practices.

"Visual Journeys Through Wordless Narratives is a particularly timely and important publication ... a thoughtful reflection on the way immigrant children are often treated in busy classrooms and schools" - International Research Society for Children's Literature

"While images are sometimes marginalized in educational texts as mere scaffolding to understand written words, this book makes the case that an intertextual literacy experience, or even an experience based mainly in images, can be valuable for children from diverse backgrounds." - Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism

"Visual Journeys ... is a fascinating account of an international research product ... designed to investigate the use of wordless visual narratives with children from different ethnic minority and immigrant backgrounds [...] The considerable achievement of Visual Journeys is that ... it has provided 'thick' data that should inspire teachers to adopt similar approaches to working on wordless narratives with young learners" - CLELE Journal, vol. 2, issue 2