Readers matter: seven transactions with the visual, linguistic and material elements in a picture book

In this paper, we draw upon Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading to frame six readings of a picture book. The picture book, There’s a Ghost in This House by Oliver Jeffers, was selected for a children’s literature reading group which brought together literacy researchers and teacher educators to share their encounters with the text. The question “How did you read the book?” provoked us to examine how we had transacted with the text to generate interpretations. This work was presented at the “Stories that Matter” seminar alongside the other papers appearing in this special edition of the Australian Journal of Language and Literacy. In this paper, we highlight our own roles as readers encountering Jeffer’s book and reflect on our own responses as a way of explaining the multiple readings we present. We emphasise the place of intertextuality and intratextuality in reader response and argue that Rosenblatt’s transactional theory continues to be an important way of understanding what it means to read, including the reading of multimodal texts which combine linguistic, visual and material modes.