Language and literacy: Features of style in the selected children’s storybooks

Abstract

This article examines the convergence of language and literacy in children’s literature using selected children’s storybooks. Underlying the main argument of this article is the contention that children’s storybooks play an important role in nurturing and augmenting learners’ literacy competencies in schools. By examining features of style in the selected text, the article sought to show how the language used by writers for children storybooks is pivotal in enhancing learners’ reading and comprehension. Thus, it examined how stylistic features are used to bring out the subject matter in the selected storybooks for Grade 3 learners. Since the values skills and values that accrue from reading the storybooks are embedded in the styles used by the authors, understanding aspects of style was deemed important because it is through them that the message is effectively communicated but the skills and values are emphatically imparted to the learners. The article has shown how various features deployed in the storybooks such as the appropriation of the etiological narrative, use of animals, nature of characterization and point of view among others, which enhance the flow of the stories, increase believability and acceptance among children. It showed how the use of various stylistic features fosters skills such as perceptive, cognitive, inferential, imaginative and critical skills as well as values such as sympathy and respect integral for grade 3 learners as espoused in the competency-based curriculum.