Abstract
This project develops evidence-based criteria for selecting picture books that induce the emergence of cultural literacy in the very young. It pays due attention to the fact that text appropriation obeys a different logic in four- to eight-year-olds than in older readers. Rather than investigating the new work in the light of familiar works, young children assimilate texts by doing things with them such as singing, dancing, or engaging in symbolic action and play. Texts will be more effectively assimilated if they can be embedded within regularly recurrent routines and cultural or religious celebrations. The pragmatic contexts of routines and rituals within which children make their first acquaintance with crucial texts spark off the process of cultural socialization in the very young. These contexts have become multi-cultural and multi-religious in contemporary globalizing society, which places new demands on the nature of cultural literacy. Assimilation is further enhanced by certain (inter) textual features that evoke these contexts on the one hand while chiming in with the developmental features of the intended audience on the other. These three shaping factors set us on the track of specific criteria of ?canonicity?, i.e. the potential to become lastingly popular. This program wants to specify, implement and validate these crucial features of canonicity, in order to gain closer insight into the assimilation of children?s literature. It comprises three projects dealing with morality and religion, poetry, and narrative texts respectively. These projects operate within a joint intervention program that introduces a preliminary selection of texts into the first grades of primary school. As emergent cultural literacy is governed by pragmatic, literary and developmental factors, it can only be adequately investigated through methods deriving from the humanities and the social sciences. Hence, this program combines tools for hermeneutic validation with methods for experimental validation.