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Analysing children's responses to text however, is not as straightforward as it may appear. Crago (1990) states that we cannot know what actually happens when a child reads, for in the very act of articulating the response, it is changed. He claims we can only study what children choose to show us of their response, and that 'the act of articulating one's inner responses changes that experience'. (p121). Crago has illustrated this in an account of his own reading log written in response to Jill Paton Walsh's A Chance Child. (see online activities). This detailed account demonstrates his engagement, his disquiet at some of the content, and both his appreciation of and criticism of, the author's style. He makes hypotheses based on his experience of reading related texts he has read, including Hans Andersen's The Little Match Girl, Nesbit, Tolkien, Browning, T. S. Eliot and Dr. Who, demonstrating a range of cultural referents. Crago's analysis works because he is reading a text which makes demands and offers possibilities for interpretation. The opening of Sachar's Holes, Malachy Doyle's Who is Jesse Flood? or Philip Ridley's Mighty Fizz Chilla allow for similar responses. To become confident in selecting the texts that challenge readers, trainees have to engage in a broad and varied reading. The 'enabling adult' (Chambers 1991) must have a range of stories in the known repertoire.
Benton suggests that in reading we enter a 'secondary world' which 'lies in an area of play activity between the reader's inner reality and the outer reality of the words on the page' (Benton & Fox 1985), and claims that reading is highly individual. Like Crago and Scholes, he advocates encouraging written responses to attempt to explore how we move on our 'journey' through a text, often changing our perceptions as we gather more information, asking children 'What pictures do you have in your mind's eye?' (p7). He also, like Crago, attaches importance to the first page of the book and suggests pausing for recording individually, then sharing in groups, initial responses. Trainees might engage in similar activities in small groups before replicating the approach in the classroom.
Scholes (1985) developed a pedagogy to move readers from experience to a reflective response. For Scholes responding to text involves text production usually written e.g. a journal entry but potentially oral. Even the youngest readers are members of a community of readers, articulating their responses and reviewing the responses of others. He proposes that the process of moving from experience to reflection consists of four recursive stages. In the first stage, the evocation of text, the reader submits to the text losing all consciousness of themselves as a reader. The second stage involves a 'conversation' with the text. The reader may be involved in retelling, paraphrasing, asking questions providing personal associations. This experience is essentially personal and the mode expressive. The third stage, interpretation, involves a consideration of the significance of the text i.e. what it means. The discourse is made public and the mode (exposition or argument) is transactional. The final stage, criticism, considers the values of the text and involves analysis assumptions within the text. Scholes' ideas can be seen in practice in Carole King's (2001) literature circles which show how children benefit from shared discussion of their expectations of a text prior to reading. and then of their initial impressions. The Poetry Circles advocated by Dias, Hayhoe and Parker (1995) also carefully scaffold the reading experience to move the readers from personal to reflective responses.
Guided reading, is intended to provide 'a bridge from dependence to independence' (Fountas and Pinnelll 1996) and is the ideal opportunity for developing thoughtful responses to text. While the recent focus on teachers' questioning skills has rightly encouraged scrutiny of what constitutes good questioning, a possible unintended outcome is an over reliance on the teacher in the discourse. In some instances very little genuine discussion takes place as the question and answers bat forwards and backwards in rapid succession between teacher and children. Certainly there is a necessity for teachers to ask fewer but better questions. Chambers' (1993) Tell Me approach shows how genuine discussion arises when appropriately framed questions are asked. Furthermore, he argues that questioning is not the only, or even the best, means of eliciting responses. Trainees need to consider how they can become complicit in the discovery of what the text has to offer rather than taking a stance that suggests that they are the repository of knowledge. Statements, prompts such as 'I wonder why… 'I'm not sure what I think about… 'I've changed my mind about this character…' are less interrogative than questions and provide children with a model for tentative thinking about text. (Hobsbaum, Gamble & Reedy 2002) They should be encouraged to reflect on their own teaching and the quality and frequency of questioning in the classroom including who is asking the questions. The aim of questioning is to get children to internalise the process of asking questions. It follows that in guiding reading teachers work to support and encourage pupils to ask their own questions. Give children the opportunities to lead the discussion so that your high status within the group is not prohibitive to genuine discussion.
Trainees can be encouraged to read closely and devise a few good questions that require inferential thinking and prompts to encourage deeper reflection. The might also be asked to think about ways of organising and managing book talk to develop autonomous readers. For instance, they should consider ways in which children are given opportunities to make tentative individual responses before sharing ideas in a forum where dominant views might prohibit diversity of response. The might use a poetry circle (Dias, Hayhoe and Parker 1995), introduce reading journals (King 1999) or encourage sketching of initial responses. Paired talk might be used as a means of providing thinking time and allowing pupils to formulate ideas before contributing to a group discussion. Having enabled children 'converse' in various ways with the text they can then devise strategies that develop interpretative and critical responses (see online activities xx). To develop children's responses effectively, trainees will need to understand both the nature and demands of the texts and the reading behaviours they wish to develop children. When they are secure in this understanding they can more assuredly consider how best to approach the detailed objectives outlined within the NLS framework.
 
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