International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is all bad and then he becomes all good. It is not

believable. He’s too bad and then too good. C.S.Lewis is saying to you, ‘This kid is

bad but if he learns to be good, that is good in the way I think—through taking on

Christian values— he will become all good and never do any more bad things’.

C.S.Lewis is too obviously directing your sympathies about what you should

admire.

Teaching Reflexiveness

One of the most productive and unanticipated findings of the research interview/
workshops is that conscious understanding of one’s own productive reading strategies—
or reflexiveness—can be taught at each stage of reading development. In retrospect, it
can be seen as a function of the one-to-one relationship between student and
interviewer and of the form of the enquiry into reading processes. The purposes of the
interview were made explicit to each student at the outset, and the activities organised
to identify students’ reading strategies promoted students’ interest in, and awareness of,
their own reading processes. The students saw themselves as co-researchers, and
formulated many of the productive findings of the research for the researcher. At the end
of the interview/workshop all the students expressed some satisfaction in their newly
acquired knowledge of their own reading powers.
Most of the more passive and unreflective readers did learn the pleasures and
productivity of generating expectations, and expressed both surprise and satisfaction
that some of their earlier attitudes to both stories and their own competencies as
readers might have to be modified. In response to two of the questions about their
reading strategies (‘What is going on in your head while you are listening?’; ‘What do you
think might happen in this story?’) most of these students expressed surprise at the
notion that they should be actively doing anything. They thought that text operated on
readers rather than that readers had to operate on text; that the minds of good readers
automatically processed print into understanding; and the fact that their minds didn’t
seem to do this too well indicated that they were bad readers because they were
unintelligent. The act of asking students what questions they were asking of the text
read aloud to them led them to ask productive questions, and the enabling security of
the interview situation led them to think aloud while doing so.
For example, here is the response of a 14-year-old non-reader to the opening section
of Betsy Byars’s novel, The Cartoonist. In the passage, a comic strip being drawn by Alfie,
the central character, is described as follows:

In the first square a man was scattering birdseed from a bag labelled ‘Little Bird

Seed’. In the next square little birds were gobbling up the seeds.

In the third square the man was scattering birdseed from a bag labelled ‘Big Bird

Seed’. In the next square big birds were gobbling up the seeds.

In the fifth square the man was scattering huge lumps from a bag labelled ‘Giant

Bird Seed’. In the last square a giant bird was gobbling up the little man.

Byars 1978/1981:5–6

APPLICATIONS OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 583