In line with educational issues involved in emergent literacy practices in preschool, in particular
those concerning comprehension processes, this paper focuses on picture-based narrative comprehension
during an interactive reading session of a wordless picture book, involving a group of children aged three
and their teacher. Children are asked to make inferences about the meaning and outcome of the story, a
procedure which gradually elicits their responses on how events link together, thus enhancing their capacity
to use prior and implicit knowledge to build the story meaning. Moreover, this study highlights the
importance of interaction for developing comprehension.
Data collected was analysed following didactic microgenesis, an analytical approach showing that knowledge
built during interaction depends on the joint construction of a zone of common meaning by which
teacher and children try to adjust to each other. In order to help the process of merging different meanings
of the story built online, a text written by researchers, following the narrative structure of the story, was
read by the teacher after the picture-based reading. This led us to examine through interactional analysis
which semiotic cues were used during recall on the following day, as an additional measure of knowledge
construction.