Får dom vara med? : En studie av tillgänglighet i en bilderbok

Sammanfattning: The purpose of the study is to analyse the accessibility in and to a picture book. The book was selected on the basis of loan statistics in a multilingual school. At the third place in the statistics was the most lent student-selected picture book Alfons and Milla (Bergström, 1985) which is the focus of this study. The book was analysed as to its accessibility in three different ways: the accessibility to the relationships revealed in the illustrations of the book, the accessibility to the interaction between image and written text, and also the librarian’s influence regarding the physical accessibility of the book.   The study reveals that the relationships between the characters in the book were often implicitly expressed and therefore an advanced literate understanding is required to understand the relations between the characters and to get access to the whole story. The correspondence between texts and images were often weak as the texts did not explicitly describe what was really happening in the image but instead described other things. This means that to completely understand and get access to the interaction between text and image the reader must have developed a rather advanced literate competence. Regarding the physical access to the book, the librarian actually tried to minimize the physical accessibility to the book in favour of other books.   The conclusion of the study is that the reader must be able to make many interpretations to grip the implicit meanings in the book. Such interpretations require quite an advanced literate competence. The book is popular among the multilingual pupils which show that they find pleasure in the book in one way or another even though they might not understand all implicit relations. The didactic implication of the study is that the pupils might need explicit teaching about how to reveal implicit meanings in literature in order to make them get a deeper understanding of the books they read. This is also a way of supporting their development of critical literacy.