International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

further discussion and practical mapping of grammatical differences this is what the
children themselves recorded about their discovery.

What we learnt about the grammatical patterns in Piggybook

Beginning

All the goals Mrs Piggott did were to do with housework. Only Mrs Piggott had goals.
This shows she is the only one doing something to something else.
Mr Piggott and the boys only did things for themselves; they did not do work in the
home. This is shown by the fact that they didn’t have any goals. They were the only
characters that talked. They told Mrs Piggott to hurry up.

Resolution

At the end, everyone did an action to something—to benefit the whole family, not just
themselves. Everyone had goals at the end.

Now the goals for Mrs Piggott included more than housework.

She mended the car.

Just one moment in one class with one text and one particular teacher. But perhaps
there is a suggestion here that children might be able to participate, with enthusiasm, in
the search for linguistic patterning and its significances.
Margaret Meek observes that ‘Children read stories they like over and over again;
that’s when they pay attention to the words—after they’ve discovered what happens’
(1988:36). What we have yet to find more about is the means through which children
can be assisted to attend to ‘words’. Heath’s work, and that of others who have followed
her lead, suggests there is nothing natural about these processes. Indeed Vygotsky’s
meticulous analysis of the ontogenesis of voluntary attention shows just how deeply
social these apparently natural processes of attention are (Vygotsky 1981). It seems that
offering children some access to semiotic tools which enable them to describe visual and
verbal patterning in literary text may have some potential to develop a different reading
pedagogy, remaking it to include the possibility of children delighting intelligently and
critically in the nature of a text’s composition without excluding their enjoyment of the
constructed story.

References

Auden, W.H. (1948) The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, London: Faber.
Bakhtin, M. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. C.Emerson and M. Holquist,
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Barthes, R. (1974) S/Z, trans. R.Miller, New York: Hill and Wang.
Bernstein, B. (1990) Class, Codes and Control, Vol. 4, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Browne, A. (1986) Piggybook, London: MacRae.

574 APPLICATIONS OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE