The listener’s response to this was a surprised laugh and the following unprompted
comment:
I expected the giant birds to eat up the giant food instead of the man, and I thought
it would go on to have super-giant seeds for a super-bird to eat. But that’s great. I
really like that, the way you expect one thing and it gets turned round on you. It
gives you a surprise and it’s very funny. I really like jokes like that. Are there lots
more like that in the book?Later on, he speculated that as Alfie would rather draw cartoons in his room than watch
television with his mother, he might be a boy who ‘does things on his own and mightn’t
get on with other kids’. This student has taken the first step to become an active reader.
As with all the other non-readers and reluctant readers his developing consciousness of
his own reading strategies is turning him into a real reader.
What I think is most interesting about almost all of the unsuccessful readers in the
research is that at the end of the interviews/workshops they said things like ‘I didn’t
know so much happened in my mind when I read’, and ‘I’ve never been much good at
reading, but I know some of the ways to make it more interesting now’. The importance
of the supportive and secure interview/workshop situation is, I think, that in it the
students became conscious of the constructive strategies that the questions led them to
use. It was not that these students were intellectually incapable of reading with
enjoyment and understanding but, rather, that they had previously not been placed in
situations in which they could learn how to go about it successfully. They possessed the
capacity for reading productively, but seem not to have experienced situations that
called on them to use that capacity. In the interviews they also gained an inkling that
their consciousness of their own productive reading strategies is a powerful educational
tool.
All students have internalised some of the conventions of reading and, therefore, have
a potential ‘literary competence’; but what they possess they often don’t use because
they don’t know they have it or how to use it. Knowing what you know and knowing how
you came to know it is very powerful knowledge. People can control and direct their own
thinking when they are reflexively conscious of the productive moves they make when
engaged in it.
Teaching Adolescents to Question the TextStudents can be taught to interrogate, argue with and fill in the gaps of literary texts if
they understand the point and experience the rewards of doing so. The productive
reading strategies can be taught when students are encouraged to formulate their own
questions arising from their own puzzlement, rather than being directed to answers set
by the teacher. When students are reading to answer other people’s questions they
inevitably see the text as an object and the reader’s role as one of extracting meaning.
They become passive ciphers rather than active and reflective meaning-makers. They
also experience boredom. Furthermore, when answers to other people’s questions are
assessed as being right or wrong, the textual puzzles and problems become sources of
584 TEENAGERS READING: DEVELOPMENTAL STAGES OF READING LITERATURE