An East Asian framework for interpreting cultural representations in Vietnamese children’s picturebooks

Among various applications of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) theory has been the development of semiotic frameworks for interpreting multimodal texts, including the frameworks for analysing children’s picturebooks (Painter et al., 2013; Serafini, 2014). On one hand, contemporary semiotic frameworks are limited to Western cultures (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). On the other hand, recent research has revealed limitations of applying contemporary semiotic frameworks for interpreting cultural representations in Vietnamese children’s picturebooks (Authors, 2018; 2019; 2020a; 2020b). Furthermore, little research has worked on exploring the usefulness of non-Western analytical frameworks for interpreting cultural representations in East Asian children’s picturebooks. To fill such a gap in the literature, this paper first introduced an East Asian framework for interpreting visual meanings of images in Vietnamese children’s picture books. Then, the paper demonstrated the usefulness of such a framework in exploring cultural representations in children’s picturebooks about Vietnam. Findings and discussions in this paper offer a significant contribution to research on the theory of multimodality, the proposed analytical framework in this paper will be a helpful reference for researchers and teachers to apply in their studies and teachings of intercultural awareness through multicultural picturebooks.