The album/picture books in V.O. in the language course: from the student actor to the subject reader in L2

Abstract

Picture-books have often been used in modern languages classes in French primary schools. Indeed, their linguistic and stylistic qualities make them, not only really useful and efficient to help children learn words and phrases in their second language, but also to develop skills in phonology in this language. And their pictures can be used to help children understand the text and to incite them to speak.
However, picture-books shouldn’t be reduced only to their linguistic contents. The question is whether those books couldn’t enable children to learn more than linguistic elements and whether a task-based approach couldn’t encourage a more literary reading of these texts. By making children more active and by focusing on their way of reading and re-writing picture-books, can’t teachers help them also develop reading skills in a second language?
Keywords: picture-books, teaching/learning languages, task-based approach, re-writing, subject
reader