A Wild Animal Inside My House: An Analysis of the Children’s Picturebook Svenn the Otter and the Magic Rock by Espen Villseth and Anita Sletten Nahúm M. Tórrez Department of Language and Literature, University of South-Eastern Norway, Horten, Norway; Tranby Middle School, Lier, Norway Marjorie N. Gómez Department of Language and Literature, Universidad Nacional Autonóma de Nicaragua, Estelí, Nicaragua Abstract—Svenn, a wild otter, has become an Instagram celebrity with over 140,000 followers around the world. Svenn has his own YouTube channel and Facebook page. Moreover, in December 2020, NRK, an influential Norwegian TV channel, released a series entitled “Oteren Svenn” (Svenn, the Otter), consisting of ten episodes. In addition to all of this, Svenn has his own picturebook for children, which is entitled Svenn the Otter and the Magic Rock (Villseth & Sletten, 2020). This article presents the picturebook and analyzes three of its significant spreads. The aim is to uncover aspects of the sociocultural context in which Svenn – along with other characters – is portrayed by images and verbal language in the book, and to provide a short discussion of how the book may be used in English Language Teaching (ELT). Our analysis builds on tools from multimodal text analysis (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2005; van Leeuwen, 2005) and Narrative Intelligence (Mateas & Senger, 2003). The analysis focuses on the significance of the picturebook to represent participants in actions, the relationship between the book’s participants and the reader, and the value of presenting images and verbal text together. Our analysis also touches on some implications for ELT, on the potential that visual literacy can have in language teaching. Index Terms—children’s picture books, Svenn, the otter, English Language Teaching (ELT), multimodality I. INTRODUCTION Svenn has become an Instagram celebrity with over 140,000 followers around the world. Svenn has his own YouTube channel and Facebook page. Moreover, in December 2020, NRK, an influential Norwegian TV channel, released a series entitled “Oteren Svenn” (Svenn, the Otter), consisting of ten episodes. In addition to all this, Svenn has his own picturebook for children, entitled Svenn the Otter and the Magic Rock (Villseth & Sletten, 2020). The aforementioned statements demonstrate how increasingly interconnected the world is through different resources. We are currently interacting with a wider range of communication practices: videos that can be edited and posted on the Internet or documents that can be sent in seconds or shared simultaneously (Freire, 2020). We are also constantly overwhelmed with new textual genres (e.g., blogs, pop-up ads). Moreover, we have technological resources that allow us to choose more easily between ways of meaning making (e.g., posting a photo of a scene rather than describing it verbally) (Fuchs, Hauck, & Müller-Hartmann, 2012). Based on these observations, we highlight the increasing role that images are taking on in different spaces (e.g., education), in comparison to – and alongside – verbal language, in a wide diversity of texts in our daily lives. Texts or printed works have shaped different aspects of society since human beings began to manifest their reality by manipulating linguistic signs in order to record moments, stories, or creations (Lehtonen, 2000). Texts, marked by the development of languages around the world and the socio-cultural expansion of their different variations, are vast and mixed. Therefore, it is not wrong to consider texts as part of cultures, products of different contexts based on social interaction and supported by communities that enable the development of languages in their different manifestations (e.g., visual, semiotic). As Lehtonen (2000) points out, human beings embody some kind of social spoken and unspoken language. For instance, visual literacy, which can be understood as the active process of reading, interpreting and understanding images and visual media, has been developed in compelling ways in different educational subjects in education; for example, in English (Stafford, 2010). One of the values of visual literacy is its link to the act of storytelling, which helps us to better understand concepts such as plots, themes or narratives. In this article, we present the children’s picturebook Svenn the Otter and the Magic Rock and analyze a group of three significant spreads. Our aim is to analyze aspects of the sociocultural context in which Svenn – along with other ISSN 1798-4769 Journal of Language Teaching and Research, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 333-342, May 2021 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/jltr.1203.02 © 2021 ACADEMY PUBLICATION