significance which Culler (1977) accords it. Although classroom readings begin by taking
the figures of a text as given, it is usually not very long before children can be helped to
notice features such as intertextual play and the repetitions and parallel structures of
wordings which are the very basis of how literary texts mean.
One interesting example of such work is given by Aidan Chambers (Chambers 1985,
1993). Chambers’s provocative question, first raised in Booktalk (1985) was this: are
children critics, where the work of critics is understood in the terms Auden proposed in
The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (1948)? His evidence suggests that they may be.
Chambers and his teacher collaborators describe children’s participation in three types
of ‘sharing’: sharing enthusiasms, sharing puzzles and sharing connections. The third is
subtitled ‘discovering patterns’, and includes a framework of discussion through which
sharing of ideas might take place, including the highly significant question ‘Were there
any patterns—any connections—that you noticed?’ As with any proposal for a general
framework, there is a danger that such a methodology might come to restrict what
might be talked about with a particular text. Chambers himself warns repeatedly
against this (for example, 1993:87). But it is a danger which is a problem for any specific
pedagogical proposal, and therefore not a criticism of the approach itself. Pedagogical
proposals which avoid the specific transmit their own invitations to rigidity.
In investigating the patterning of text it eventually becomes necessary to say something
about what it is that is patterned. This requirement leads directly to a need for
metasemiotic tools: a language to talk about language, or about other meaning systems.
Here we come full circle to the beginnings of this discussion, to ask a question which it
has only been possible to raise within reading pedagogy during the last few years. The
question is this: as people with an interest in various facets of children’s literature learn
more about the nature of textuality by using a range of metasemiotic tools (Doonan
1993), is it possible that children might also learn to participate in such explorations
through accessible metasemiotic tools?
To exemplify, and in a sense to offer a test case, I will describe a specific, exploratory
instance of work of this kind as the final movement of this chapter. The work was with a
class of 11-year-olds and forms part of a research project concerned with children’s
development of knowledge about language being conducted at the University of Sydney.
The teacher, Ruth French, is part of the small research group. The general purpose of this
work is to explore children’s understandings of the significance of variation in language.
So far as literary text is concerned, the children were encouraged to investigate effects of
variation in the patterning of certain kinds of meaning within a specific text. It is
important, though, in order to place the literary work in the more general context to
begin by describing aspects of the work on language variation.
The children knew well, from sharing between various members of the class, that
languages themselves vary. The majority had a language other than English as their
mother tongue, including Tamil, Mandarin, German and Italian, and their knowledge
was an important resource for the rest of the class. For example, Giridhar taught the
class something of the Tamil alphabet, Cathy showed them how difficult it is to write
Mandarin, Eric talked about differences between his (Austrian) German and the German
spoken in Germany itself. Since all of the children were learning to speak Italian they
could make their own comparisons with English. They also knew that English varies in
572 APPLICATIONS OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE