The purpose of the study is to analyse the accessibility in and to a picture book. The
book was selected on the basis of loan statistics in a multilingual school. At the third
place in the statistics was the most lent student-selected picture book Alfons and Milla
(Bergström, 1985) which is the focus of this study. The book was analysed as to its
accessibility in three different ways: the accessibility to the relationships revealed in the
illustrations of the book, the accessibility to the interaction between image and written
text, and also the librarian’s influence regarding the physical accessibility of the book.
The study reveals that the relationships between the characters in the book were
often implicitly expressed and therefore an advanced literate understanding is required
to understand the relations between the characters and to get access to the whole story.
The correspondence between texts and images were often weak as the texts did not
explicitly describe what was really happening in the image but instead described other
things. This means that to completely understand and get access to the interaction
between text and image the reader must have developed a rather advanced literate
competence. Regarding the physical access to the book, the librarian actually tried to
minimize the physical accessibility to the book in favour of other books.
The conclusion of the study is that the reader must be able to make many
interpretations to grip the implicit meanings in the book. Such interpretations require
quite an advanced literate competence. The book is popular among the multilingual
pupils which show that they find pleasure in the book in one way or another even
though they might not understand all implicit relations. The didactic implication of the
study is that the pupils might need explicit teaching about how to reveal implicit
meanings in literature in order to make them get a deeper understanding of the books
they read. This is also a way of supporting their development of critical literacy.