Developing
Response
Analysing children's responses to text however, is not as
straightforward as it may appear. Crago (1991) 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' (p. 121). Crago has illustrated this in an
account of his own reading log written in response to Jill Paton Walsh's A Chance Child. This detailed account
demonstrates his engagement, his disquiet at some of the content, and both his
appreciation 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,
student teachers have to engage in a broad and varied reading. The 'enabling
adult' (Chambers 1993) 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 and Fox, 1985), and claims that
reading is highly individual. Like Crago (1991) and Scholes (1985), 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 ideas individually, then sharing responses in
groups.
Activity
Select a range of beginnings (of
three pages each approximately) from children's books and ask student teachers
individually to note their responses after the first page (or a suitable
section), the second and the third pages. Ask them to draw the pictures that
they envisage as they continue reading.
How did their impressions of the main character(s) develop as they
continued reading?
Ask them to compare notes with
someone else and to discuss what might account for any different
interpretations.
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 (see also the topic Reading at KS2). The poetry circles
advocated by Dias and Hayhoe (1988) 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 Pinnell, 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. Student teachers 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 or 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 and 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. Some useful ideas are poetry circles (Dias
and Hayhoe, 1988), reading journals (King, 2001) or 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.
Activity
This will need time to complete
Ask student teachers to select
part of a book they know well and devise a few good questions that require
inferential thinking and prompts to encourage deeper reflection.
How might they give the children
opportunities to make tentative individual responses before sharing their ideas
in a forum where dominant views might prohibit diversity of response?
Both Gamble and Yates (2007) Exploring Children's Literature
and Hobsbaum, Gamble and
Reedy (2002) Guiding Reading will be useful
background reading before carrying out this Activity.
To
develop children's responses effectively, student teachers will need to
understand both the nature and demands of the texts and the reading behaviours
they wish to develop in children.
