Language Resources Blog

The Arrival Analysis: This webpage will provide an analysis of chapter 2 of the picture book, The Arrival. Other webpages will devote analysis to subsequent chapters of the The Arrival.The analysis webpages will outline, in detail, how to use The Arrival as a primary oral and written language intervention text.

The Arrival is a complex book with many themes to explore and requires maximal scaffolding for younger students. Some of the book's themes will be explored on this webpage.

Graphic Novel Format - The Arrival Analysis

The Arrival is a picture book that perhaps has more in common with the graphic novel format than classic picture book design. The book has no recognisable text. The story is instead propelled forward by Shaun Tan's highly detailed illustrations. The Arrival is the story of an immigrant family's journey to a strange country to forge a new and better life.

The story appears to be set sometime in late 19th and early 20th century, in what is essentially an alternate world. A world that is both familiar and yet has strong fantastical elements. According to Shaun Tan, many of the illustrations are based on photographs and autobiographical accounts of the mass immigration to countries such as the United States and Australia that occurred during the early to mid 20th century.

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Chapter 1 Outline - The Arrival Analysis

• The story begins with a panel of nine individual drawings, presented much like a comic book. In a sequence, we view a man packing photos and clothes into a suticase. 
• The next page features the wife holding her husband's hand in their clean but impoverished kitchen as the husband prepares to leave on a journey.
• The next page features 12 panels of the family rising and dressing to start the day. The small family walks to the train station while the shadow of what appears to be the tail of a dragon hovers overhead.
• A dramatic double page spread shows that the dragons and their shadows hover over the town in a menacing way.
• The next two pages feature the man saying farwell to his tearful wife and daughter, while giving an origami bird to his daughter as he boards a train to an unknown destination. The final page shows the wife and daughter return to their house while the dragons continue to hover over the town in an indistinct but threatening manner.

Communicative Reading Strategies

The language intervention method used to access The Arrival's themes and topics is communicative reading strategies. CRS, or shared strategic reading, is a series of scaffolded techniques that are effective at making reading of text (or indeed, wordless picture books) a meaning making event, particularly for students who struggle to comprehend much of what they read.

CRS consists of a number of cueing strategies whereby a clinician engages students in a form of scaffolded dialogue which is centred on themes and events depicted in a storybook, often a picturebook. Cues that access print, illustrations, context, and prior knowledge are used in a systematic way to unlock a book's deeper meaning. 

Please download the shared strategic reading cue examples to aid you when first using CRS.

Prestory Knowledge Discussion - The Arrival Analysis

Click to download the Prestory Semantic Map PDF file.

The clinician begins the session by telling the student that they will read the first chapter of the Arrival together. Because the Arrival is a wordless book, the clinician and student spend the time slowly looking, in depth, at the illustrations in chapter one. The Arrival is about immigration. The following prestory discussion took place between the clincian and a ten year old student named Alex.

Clinician: "The Arrival is a graphic novel. Graphic novels tell a story often only with images and no text, as in this book. The pictures and the picture sequence tell the story, a little like a comic book."

The clinician places the prestory graphic organizer in front of Alex. 

Clinician: "We're going to talk a little about the themes in this book. Probably the most important theme is the theme of immigration. Have you heard of immigration Alex?"

Alex: "I've heard the word. Don't know what it means."

Clinician: "Let's begin by looking up the word in a dictionary."

Alex, with  some assistance, finds the word immigration in a dictionary. The dictionary states that immigration is 'to move to a country of which one is not a native in order to settle there.'

Clinician: "Immigration is about a person or people moving to another country to start a new life. I'd like you to write immigration in the top box please Alex."

Alex writes immigration in the top box on the prestory graphic organizer following a prompt from the clinician.