“A picture book” and its educational potential

The author has aimed at unleashing the educational potential of contemporary children’s and adolescent books and the possibilities of working with them in the class setting. The books (the ones mentioned in the research body are included in the first part of the bibliography) are inherently texts of a new nature, they suggest markedly different practices of working with them which allow to synthesize their verbal and visual components while reading them. For this very reason work with them should be included in the educational process – because while working like that a student will master close reading techniques, ways of checking one’s own understanding and will also fulfill creative tasks. Describing and analyzing the selected books, the author demonstrates which reading practices (reading with pauses, synthesizing a continuous and discontinuous text while reading, creative tasks based on the texts and others) are offered by the designer on the pages of the books and claims that mastering publishers’ strategies, if it becomes a professional goal, will considerably enlarge teachers’ methodological instrumentarium, will allow teachers to master new techniques of working with a multicode text and to include the former into the learning process. In the course of the research the author introduces and explains concepts that are new for the national methodology of teaching literature: text of a new nature, architecture of a book – and justifies the need for using them in the professional discourse. Generally, the article demonstrates the need for engaging ‘picture books’ at the lessons of literature as long as dealing with them will broaden the reading circle of a contemporary student and will prepare them for further independent reading of various texts and books.