International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

3 We haven’t matched readers and books very well. We haven’t started where our

students are and progressed from there. We haven’t started where the students are,

I believe, for two reasons. The public examination has been the major influence on

our teaching, rather than the needs of students. We expect them to arrive without

having travelled, so many students move from Blyton et al. in upper primary to

Shakespeare et al. in upper secondary without passing through Nadia Wheatley,

Rosemary Sutcliff, Alan Garner, Betsy Byars, Robert Cormier, Aidan Chambers, Jan

Mark, Peter Dickinson and so on, on the way. Second, we haven’t started where our

students are because we don’t know where our students are. Are there

developmental stages? Can they be identified? What do readers at each of these

stages do when they read? Can we help them to progress from one stage to the next,

increasing their enjoyment rather than destroying it in our attempts?

4 Instead of teaching students how to read better and with more enjoyment we have

concentrated on explaining in detail how a few expert readers called ‘critics’, have

read specific texts. We haven’t passed on what Jonathan Culler calls ‘literary

competence’ (Culler 1975), and we haven’t done so because we haven’t identified the

reading activities or strategies that constitute such competence.

The aims of the research were, therefore, to see if clear staging points could be identified
in students’ literary development (towards greater control over texts), and to identify the
strategies used at each stage.

Value to Teachers

A developmental model that enables teachers to work out fairly easily each student’s
level of reading should be very useful in indicating what it is that each student already
does competently. At present, teachers are more aware of what young readers don’t
understand rather than what they do understand. Students are far more likely to
progress in situations in which teachers build on the constructive strategies they do
possess—and which they are shown they possess—rather than in ‘remedial’ situations
which emphasise their inadequacies and draw their attention to them. In the Bathurst
workshops many reluctant readers found how easy it was to enjoy reading and to learn
new reading strategies when they started to believe in their own abilities and to
concentrate on meaning and their own interests in a story rather than on what they had
come to see as teacherly concerns.

A Developmental Model

In the developmental model set out below (influenced by the work of D.W. Harding 1937/
1972, 1962 and 1967), the kinds of satisfaction readers experience are ordered in
successive stage of increasing complexity of reading. These satisfactions are also
cumulative: a good reader who reads at the highest levels also experiences enjoyments
at earlier levels. The pleasure that comes from reviewing a whole text as an author’s
construction does not supersede, but rather supplements, the pleasures of empathising
and analogising, for example. Similarly, the strategies of reading which students use at

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