How the images explained the text to me : A study of the didactic potential of the illustrated young adult novel Wie der Wahnsinn mir die Welt erklärte (How Madness Explained the World to Me) by Dita Zipfel and Rán Flygenring for the use in subject German as a foreign language in the Swedish upper secondary school

The purpose of this study is to examine the didactic potential of the German young adult novel Wie der Wahnsinn mir die Welt erklärte (How Madness Explained the World to Me) by Dita Zipfel, with illustrations by Rán Flygenring (2021), for Swedish upper secondary school students. The reason for this is that the reading skills of Swedish upper secondary school students have declined in recent years, which underlines the importance of reading education in all school subjects. ‘Didactic potential’ is defined here using the concept of ‘scaffolding’ developed by Bruner, Wood and Ross (1976). The study is conducted using qualitative text analysis, which examines how various aspects of scaffolding can be found in the relationships between text and illustrations within the novel. The aim is to show that a carefully selected text can help readers in the reading process (defined here by ‘the active view of reading’) and can itself function as a ‘scaffolder’. The results of the study suggest that different types of relationships between text and illustrations can help to support different components of the reading process.