“IS KANCIL KIND?”: EXPLORING THE INTERPLAY OF VERBAL AND VISUAL TEXTS IN A PICTURE BOOK FOR TEACHING ENGLISH TO YOUNG LEARNERS
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Picture books have long been recognized as a valuable vehicle for language learning, offering the combination of visual and linguistic support, and despite the rise of digital media, they remain an essential resource for language learning. This study scrutinizes the relationship between verbal and visual texts in a picture book for meaning-making and explores the potential of a picture book for the teaching of English to young learners. This qualitative study uses two primary data sources: the Indonesian children’s picture book The Kind Mouse Deer and video-recorded teaching simulations from two elementary English teachers. The book was analyzed using the Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) approach and the videos were analyzed using content analysis. The findings show that the book employs visual texts to repeat or complement the verbal elements. The complementarity of verbal and visual elements was found to be used by teachers to help young EFL learners understand the story in English. During the simulations, they also used a mix of Bahasa Indonesia and English, supplemented by facial expressions and gestures to convey meaning in terms of story plot and description of characters. Further research is needed to investigate classroom implementation, highlighting students’ engagement with picture books in developing their English proficiency.
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