This article features Grade 7 students' oral and written responses to Shaun Tan's 2001 The Red Tree, one of the picturebooks used during two multifaceted, classroom based research projects. As well as examining how the students responded to and interpreted texts with metafictive devices, the research explored how students transferred their knowledge and understanding of various literary and art elements in picturebooks and graphic novels when creating their own multimodal print texts. The discussion of one small group's transcript excerpts and written responses reveals how the students engaged in collaborative talk as they worked to interpret the artwork and text in Tan's picturebook, and how their exploratory talk affected their written work. The article concludes by exploring several factors that need to be considered when developing effective pedagogy for classroom talk. [Author's abstract]
