Educators’ changing interpretive stance and meaning-making language during shared reading of a postmodern picture book

This study examines how educators’ changing interpretive stance toward a postmodern picture book is manifested in their meaning-making language during shared reading. While prior research has emphasized contextual factors and interactional strategies, less attention has been paid to how educators’ interpretations of multimodal texts shape their discursive practices. Drawing on reader-response theory and systemic functional linguistics (SFL), interpretive stance is conceptualized as a discursive orientation mediating language choices. In particular, the analysis of meaning-making language focuses on the ideational function of SFL, examining how educators construe experience and represent meaning during shared reading. Thirty Chinese preschool educators participated in a professional learning program centred on the contradictory text–image relations in This Is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen. Interviews and recorded shared reading sessions were analysed before and after the program. Findings show shifts in interpretive stance, accompanied by increased use of inferential language and more dialogically open meaning-making, including greater elaboration of implicit meanings and alternative interpretations. These changes were reflected in more complex ideational representations and perspectives. The study advances the proposition that how educators read shapes how they talk and highlights literary interpretation as a discursive resource that enriches the educator–child interactional ecology of shared reading.