International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

49

Reading and Literacy

Geoffrey Williams

Introduction

Over the past decade or so children’s literature has assumed a new status in the
teaching of reading in the first years of school. Previously, though enthusiastic teachers
read to children during story time, actual instruction in reading ‘skill’ was largely carried
out through specially written materials, in the form of reading schemes and
comprehension exercises. The result was that for very many children Janet and John,
Dick and Jane were more familiar figures of fiction than Rosie, Alfie or Tom Long. There
have, of course, always been teachers who understood that the texts through which
children learned to read were important for the kinds of readers they became, but these
exceptions were the more remarkable because the dominant practices were so strong.
Some features of recent changes in literacy pedagogy which give children’s literature a
new status in reading pedagogy are explored in this chapter. There are two aspects of
particular interest: appreciation of the significance of the semiotic patterning of literary
texts; and explorations of effects of ways of talking about literary texts. Certain ways of
talking about narrative in some families have profoundly influenced the teaching of
reading, but these pedagogic strategies rest on specific images of relations between
home and school reading practices, which it is therefore important to examine closely. In
particular, the metaphor of an essential partnership between home and school literacy
practices will be under focus. The chapter also considers different forms of classroom
work which develop through the metaphors of personal response to, and collaborative
exploration of, literary text, and concludes with an image of a class of 11-year-old
children using metasemiotic tools, in this case linguistic tools, to talk about a book they
enjoyed greatly. For reasons of space the discussion is restricted to the early periods of
children’s literacy development in primary school, a selection which is perhaps justified
by the fact that far greater critical attention is usually given to adolescents’ reading.

Texts in Reading Development

When children learn to read, they do so by reading something, texts, in fact. Despite this
truism the effects of texts have been very little studied in reading pedagogy. A typical
formulation is that ‘Children learn to read’, and it is the agent ‘children’ and the process