Thoughts on what children bring to reading

Thoughts on what children bring to reading

Karen Zelan

Introducing children to reading

A critical question that is hardly ever addressed is the meaning reading has for the child. We are more likely to appreciate the meaning reading has for us as adults, such as the impact of great literature on our lives, or the ways in which the learning of reading is related to the acquisition of other language skills or, if we are teachers, the pros and cons of specific techniques for the teaching of reading. Concentration on the meaning of reading from an adult perspective obscures from view what it means to the child. While research has suggested that the child's acquisition of spoken language is quite different from his acquisition of those skills needed to master reading (Smith, I977), the meaning to the child of both language functions reveals that this is not so from his perspective. Reading, for the child--especially reading aloud to the teacher or parent--is very like spoken conversation because from the child's perspective meaning is transmitted by both spoken and written messages. Therefore, if our focus is on the child, and his or her own views of what reading means, we must consider the child's perspective as part of a two-way exchange in which the adult teacher helps the child student to master the skills required by reading. We cannot hope to teach the child by merely bringing to bear the results of psycholinguistic or experimental learning research, or by merely

Karen Zelan (United States). Psychotherapist and psychologist. Go-author with Bruno Bettelheim of On learning to Read. Author of the forthcoming publieation, The Risks of Knowing: Children Who Won' t Learn.

resolving the debate about which technical strategy--the phonetic or the sight-reading approach--will ultimately speed the child's acquisition of reading skills. I f we view the goal of reading as literacy, we cannot rely on such research results or technical expertise alone in our attempts to teach reading skills and reading literacy to the child. We must investigate as well what the act of reading tells the child and why, on many occasions, it does not tell the child anything of substance because what he is asked to read has no literary merit.

Once we ask the questions, 'What does reading mean to children?' or 'What kinds of meanings do children find in reading?' we are led then to ask 'How should the meaning attributed by children to reading influence the ways in which we present reading?' The most efficacious way to make reading attractive to children and to facilitate their learning is to bring together the results of research with an awareness of the child's viewpoint. One without the other is insufficient. Sylvia Ashton-Warner's (I964) or- ganic approach, for example, breaks down as children develop because reading only for idiosyncratic meaning blocks the way for the child at a later stage and age to understand other, more general, meanings in the text. Concen- trating solely on the individual child and what reading means to him or her deprives the child of finding out what reading means to others and, in particular, what a story theme might have meant to its author, the other children in the classroom, or the teacher. Similarly, concentration only on research results which suggest how language functions are acquired, or which argue for or against certain teaching methods (Chall, I967) ignores that very important aspect

Prospects~ Vol. XV, No. r, r985

50 Ka~nZe~n

of the reading process which in the young child tells him that the words in storybooks are as important as the words in spoken conversations. One 5-year-old I observed became as happy as if she were at a birthday party when she mastered a few sentences which told about a little girl whose mother took her to school on the first day of kindergarten. To demonstrate her feeling of the purpose of reading--meaningful communication between two people--she ~spoke' the sentences she had just correctly read to show that reading was to her similar to important spoken conversations.

Observation of children reading suggests that letters of the alphabet may have little intrinsic meaning for them; while letters in our adult view may be the building blocks of words, which are themselves the units of phrases and sentences, and as such the route to reading mastery, the child often transmutes letters into words to give them meaning. 1 One 7-year-old who wished to get on with the story meaning, and so refused to memorize letters and their sounds, began to play around with letters as his teacher left to read with another child. His spontaneous mutterings were significant: 'C, let's see! What could C mean; could it be "see"?' He imitated staring at the other children to show the meaning of this particular transmu- tation. Then he continued: 'How about "sea", the sea at the beach? You have to see to see CI'

Gains through the printed word

Gain is an important concept in our modern Western society, and the acquisition of specific gain is often used to motivate children to learn and to read. Unfortunately, adults tend to emphasize extrinsic gains rather than those intrinsic gains associated with reading for meaning. We cannot expect to bring children to literacy or literacy to children if we tell them that the only gain which accrues with literacy is social approval or a candy bar. To the child, the teacher or parent seems to take the meaning out of reading with an apparent focus only on the technical aspects of mastery. Theme mas-

tery is often ignored by the adult, but it is not, at least not initially, by the eager child. But as adults take meaning out of reading, children can be observed putting the meaning back into reading, through their insightful and often clever reading 'mistakes' (Bettelheim and Zelan, I982). These misreadings reflect the child's preoccupations, which he or she assumes will be reflected on the printed page. While misreadings and the attitude these reflect can be called 'idiosyncratic' reading in the sense that the meaning imputed by the child to the text is often a distortion of it, these misreadings just as often represent a compromise between what appears on the page and the child's interests, wishes or fears. An interesting misreading which was packed with meaning occurred as an 8-year-old girl struggled with Charlotte's Web, a book which she loved and which totally absorbed her for one entire week. She announced one day that she had read this book three times, and added, 'Every time I read it, 1 like it better and better.' Once when she read an important passage out loud, in which the main character, Fern, pleaded with her father not to kill the runt pig, this girl read the word 'injustice' as 'injury', in a sentence which reads: 'This is the most terrible case of injustice I ever heard of' (White, 1952, p. 3).

In conversation about her substitution of 'injury' for 'injustice', the girl repeatedly pro- nounced the word 'injustice' as though '-rice' in 'injustice' rhymed with 'rice'. She was told that indeed 'injury' was an appropriate substitution for 'injustice' because both the text and the accompanying picture meant that Fern's father was about to 'injure' (kill) the runt pig. This was, to Fern, a gross injustice. At this, the girl explained: ' I always get confused about short i's and long i's, so I didn't know how to say "injustice"; maybe that's why I said "injury" instead.' She began to elaborate this spontaneous sdf-explanation with a string of associated thoughts, always correctly pronounc- ing the word 'injustice', which she had originally misread and mispronounced. While it is possible that she was enabled to correct her mis- pronunciations and her misreadings by way of

Thoughts on what children bring to reading 5I

imitation of the adult's correct language in both the decoding and spoken spheres, this cannot completely capture the meaning the child attributed to what to her was a very important book. Of the book in general, and her misreading of injury for injustice in particular, she said: ~Charlotte's Web is so good because it's about a pet and how important the runt pig was to Fern. She didn't want her pet injured and told her Dad not to do it. She wanted to take care of it and feed it. She thought it was an injustice because the pig couldn't help being born. See where it says "The pig couldn't help being born small, could it? I f I had been very small at birth, would you have killed me?".'

Such a conversation shows that reading can be a total experience for children in which problems of phonetics and problems of thematic interpretation are part of a single totality. We as adults tend to break up this totality into a number of specific technical strategies aimed at skill-learning which, we reason, will lead directly to literacy. The child on the other hand reaches for literacy in the same reading lesson that he reaches for technical skills. Discussing with the girl the meaning of a substitution of one sound for another (the long q' for the short 'i') and the meaning of a substitution of one word for another led directly to literacy; it led away from the slightly distorted meaning imputed to the text by changing a storybook father's intent to kill (an injustice) to an actu- alized injury. While it was initially unknown what meaning a substitution of injury for injustice had for this girl, the premiss that there was some elusive meaning in what she had read and said led the child to a more universal trader- standing of the text: that little girls, such as she and Fern, love to take care of pets, and want to protect them from injury.

i i

D e v e l o p m e n t a l s tages a n d t h e c h i l d ' s p e r c e p t i o n o f g a i n

The ways in which children apprehend the meaning of a text and approach literacy vary with the ways in which they apprehend aspects

of the world in general. Actual decoding of words and comprehension of the underlying theme are the two steps ordinarilyrequired of a child's correct reading (Goodman, I968; Kolers, I969; Goodman and Goodman, I977; Elkind, I974, I979). Observation of children who are just beginning m read suggests that their ideas about reading and what reading means are quite different from those of older children who have mastered much of the technique required by reading, and concern themselves primarily with thematic interpretation (Bettelheim and Zelan, I982; Zelan, n.d.). Young children in general tend to equate objects with the names we give to them. This can be seen in Piaget's (r95I, I969) observation that the less-developed child believes the names of things to be inherent in the things themselves (nominalism), that a certain object can have no other name. A spoken name seems to the child similar to a written one, so it is not surprising, from a cognitive-developmental perspective, to find that a young child of 5 or 6 who is exposed to reading for the first time tends to treat letters or words as things. As described above, letters can be transformed into words ('C' becomes 'see', or 'Y' is momen- tarily 'why'), and words are not clearly seen as distinct from what they refer to, as in the young child who believes that a chair must have the name ~chair'.

All this suggests that words and letters have more, not less, meaning for the young child because in a certain sense, words (or letters which are transformed into words) are what they denote. And since the objects that words denote have held a long-term fascination for the developing child, he approaches beginning reading, which holds out the promise of word- learning, with a similar eager fascination. The same can be said of those words that represent not objects but people. I f a reading text de- scribes mothers and fathers, the young child will eagerly apply himself to the task of text- apprehension because to him the words 'mother' or 'father' (which he often translates and misreads as 'mum' or 'dad') often merge with a significant and specific person.

52 Karen Zelan

A child's switch of words or word-meanings can lead to confusion about what the author of the text actually meant. But this does not mean that the child's rendition of the text is without meaning, as can be seen by the many symbolic suggestions and interpretive meanings a child reads into the text in his direct comments or distortions about storybooks. Idiosyncratic interpretations or distorted textual themes and the often misread words which convey these can become part of spoken conversations between the child, his classmates, and the teacher. This is not to say that distortions ought to dominate classroom discussion, but rather that the child can be led to more rational thematic interpretations in classroom discussions which embrace the thoughts, ideas and reactions of others as well as his own. The ideas of others are most readily understook when one is given a forum for one's own. In such a situation, conversations about reading are often seen by the child as similar to his reading out loud to the teacher: botll events are important com- munications which elucidate and develop important ideas--those contained in the text and those in the minds of teacher and child.

As children develop and move through the school grades, there is an increase in their ability to read for meaning at the same time that there is, in competent children, a decline in attention to individual letters or words--the elements that make up those linguistic structures (sentences or paragraphs) which impart meaning. As others have suggested, the child's greater expertise in regard to the mechanics of reading results in an 'automatization' (Elkind, I979, I981) of these mechanics (decoding words and letters) and a simultaneous display of the child's ability to reach for a more abstract'oper- ative' (Furth, 197 o) or 'connotative' (Elkind, I979, I981) level as the child leaves single- minded efforts at decoding behind, and strug- gles to comprehend textual themes. Develop- ment of certain logical structures (for example the increasing differentiation in the child's thinking between all object or person and the names which refer to these) in combination with reading practice enables him to concen-

trate less on the linguistic units and to use his energies to understand what a storybook suggests. While thematic meaning is always high in interest and importance for the child, the fact that certain intellectual skills have become almost automatic results in a heightened importance for story interpretation itself: the competent child becomes enabled single- mindedly to attend to that aspect of reading that lies at the heart of literacy--to apprehend the purpose behind composing stories or, put dif- ferently, to understand the thematic intent of the author. ~

Perhaps more important from a humanistic point of view in the child's increasing capability to attend to story meaning is his increasing capability while reading to attend to the important twin issues of self and story. As the older child's mind becomes freed of boring technical exercises, story themes seem increasingly connected to themes in the child's own life. For a child of 8, 9 or Io years who has learned to read easily, the printed text seems to mesh with his own life in a way similar to the ways in which the yield os spontaneous exploration in his play seemed at an earlier time to mesh with his inner needs. Book themes seem to tell the older child what he most needs to know about himself in a world full of people mad objects. Moreover, what he believes to be true about himself seems to be repeated in certain favourite book themes.

One 8-year-old boy who identified with a story's main character, Ken, 3 a boy about his own age, read especially well when the storybook boy said or did things which the boy who was reading either understood or believed reflected his own thoughts and feelings. He was reading a story of great interest to him because, like the story's protagonist, he was interested in magic tricks, and the story's narrative often used the first person to describe the intent of the main character. Most of the story's tricks involved a double meaning of certain key words, such as 'leg' meaning part of a person or part of a table: the boy in the story tells his grandmother that he will walk out of a room with two legs and return with six; he thereupon re-

Thoughts on what children bring to reading 53

turns with a four-legged table, so that there are six 'legs' in all.

This boy found a meeting of minds between himself and the stol~j's protagonist (and intent) in that he, like the boy in the story, was interested in tricks. The story told this boy that became adults (Ken's grandmother) can be tricked by boys, gro~ua-ups do not know everything. This meant to him that in correctly understanding this story and its trick, he might know more than a grown-up, a thought that fascinated and amused him. As he talked about a story theme which had absorbed him, he alerted his teacher to the fact that his own name, Len, rhymed with the name of the story character, Ken. In this way he tried to express that because his own name rhymed with that of the story's protagonist, he might be able to trick others as cleverly as the story's main character, Ken. He had been pleased by a story which led him to imagine how it would feel to trick an adult. A sense of story seemed in his imagination to give him a sense of self. While reading, Len understood that he and the Ken in the story were alike in that they both liked to triumph over adults in their greater understanding of tricks. It was an especially enjoyable twin understanding of self and story because it had come about through a correct decoding of a play on words in a text. By manipulating the spoken and printed word 'leg' in two different contexts (tables and people) as he both read and spoke, he had come to feel akin to a story character. He had learned about himselfmthat he liked to play tricks on adults--by reading a story in which a boy whose name rhymed with his had the same intent.

It might be that the child is led to expect that book themes will tell him about himself because, earlier, conversations (spoken language) with important people told him what he was interested in about himself. Each plane of development seems to repeat what to the child is or had been meaningful (Piaget, I969). When earlier he was told---or told others--important events of his life or aspects of his personality, now themes of storybooks seem to tell him these, or he seems to come to know

themes of his world, including other people, by way of reading aloud to an interested audi- ence, his teachers or parents.

I I

The child's awareness of self and reading

for meaning

Earlier statements of this article have implied that the child's intuitive attribution of meaning to a text as he reads is related to his own mo- tives. But the child cannot be said to have the same capability for self-reflection as an adult. Such a capability doubtless develops throughout childhood and adolescence and helps to promote an increasingly more refined sense of literacy and of literature. An awareness of story themes and their possible connection to one's own life will be different in younger children, who tend to be less self-aware, as compared with older children and adolescents. The latter become progressively more self-aware as they master problems in ways that inform them about their strengths and weaknesses (Piaget, T976, I978). This really means that to speak about 'reading for meaning' is to speak about how reading fits---or does not fitminto those meaningful aspects of the child's life as a whole. The startling number of illiterate adults in certain segments of modern society reveals that reading-for-meaning was not activated during childhood: reading at the time of learning had not been seen by the student as in any way salient to his present or future life. Learning the mechanics of reading in order to scan the sports pages or the situations vacant section of the newspaper, as two examples, are both time- limited and content-constricted applications of reading mechanics. While both reading actM- ties have value in that the first is undertaken for enjoyment and the second has potential instrumental uses, neither application of reading skills has much to do with literacy. An adult reader who applies reading competence in a restricted utilitarian fashion does not learn much about himself, which means that reading has no deep or long-lasting connection to those aspects

54 Karen Zdan

of life, such as knowledge or culture, which have given rise t o the best literature. The reading instruction we experience as children might be related to the uses to which we put it as adults: if we are taught only the mechanics with no view to possible purposes, we are more likely as adults to be equally utilitarian in seeing reading as only serving specific and restricted goals.

The reading experiences of some of these non-literate adults might have been enhanced had they been taught reading as children in a way which said 'reading can tell me about myself', or 'the way in which I respond to stories can tell others what I wish to say'. Then the incidence of illiteracy might be dramaticaUy reduced because the reasons for reading wonld be enlarged beyond the merely utilitarian. How- ever, such reading of texts as though they contain important interpersonal messages re- quires that the reader should possess a rather weU-developed sense of self as distinct from others. Child development studies tell us that this normally happens as the child emerges from the first grades of elementary school and begins serious studymapproximately around the third grade (Piaget, I969; Erikson, I95o, I959, I963). At this stage the meaning of the text advances the child to an understanding of the world of people because he is now able to consider himself as a unique individual seeking to become integrated into society. It is precisely the dawning and continuing self-awareness which leads the child to consider those particular meanings in a text that seem applicable to himself, and to wonder if what is said about himself therein is not also true of others whom he knows. Such a child or adolescent then becomes truly literate in an important sense of the word: he has made the meaning of story themes pertinent to a unique life-experience and has applied this understanding to other people who are important in his life.

Childhood literacy

What do we as adults mean by literacy? The IVebster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary (I979) defines a literate person as one possessing experience, culture, and knowledge in addition to the specific abilities to read and write. Watching children as they struggle to master the skills of reading and writing reveals that they struggle with thematic meaning, which in the competent reader eventually leads to a literary sense; that is, such a child gains knowledge, broadens his experience, and takes on at least some of the attributes of a 'cultured' person. The child spontaneously attributes meaning to what he reads: he initially approaches reading as he excitedly approached learning to talk. Talking is not learned just for the purpose of articulating words or to gain attention but to communicate ideas. When helping a child learn to talk we would never restrict ourselves merely to teaching the skill itself. In fact, 'atypical' children are those whose speech is judged to be devoid of apparent meaning; they are considered in this respect to be handicapped. The thesis presented here is that the act of reading ought to be viewed in the same light as the act of talking. Reading should be regarded as a means of communication; the teaching of it should be focused at least as much on this goal as on the skills needed to reach the goal. In this context we are enabled to observe how the child spontaneously puts reading to literate uses, and we no longer feel the need to restrict the goal of reading merely to utilitarian use. I f children spontaneously reach for literacy, why not guide them in that laudable direction?

While we can observe the child struggle with meaning as he tries to understand what knowledge a book imparts, or as he attempts to understand his place in the world as the result of understanding a story theme, we probably cannot speak of a child's sense of 'literary criticism' much before the onset of adolescence. Young children can tell whether they like a story, or can be observed deeply absorbed in

Thoughts on what children bring to reading 55

reading a favourite book which they choose because of its thematic relationship to their life. But children find it difficult to evaluate the story in a literary sense, apart from its salience to their own lives. This is because it does not occur to them that anything in the story could be different or improved, which is similar to their earlier belief that the names of objects cannot be changed. The possibility of changing the story does not occur to them because they are not aware of literary form and how near to or far from the mark a particular story might be in terms of form; and without guidance from the teacher or parent, they generally remain unaware of a story's--and author's--intent. Children's articulated reactions to stories usually take the form of q love this book!' or ' I hate this story!'. These affective reactions reflect how near the thematic meaning has come to touching the child's concerns. 4

With the approach of adolescence, children become more specific about which parts of a story or book are salient and which are not, and why. They begin to ask self-consciously: 'Does this story tell me about myself?' When the answer is 'no', they often begin to criticize the story itself--for example, that its theme is not true to human nature, or that the author did not bring out his message clearly enough, or that the story's end was unsatisfying. The degree to which the story meshes with the adolescent reader's life, then, seems to help the development of a literary sense in that the adolescent becomes able to differentiate between what he brings to the story and what he gets from it. He can reason that the absence of literary effect can spring from two sources: his own lack of understanding or the story's in- adequacy as literature. The latter has the effect of bringing out early attempts at literary criticism.

One competent I3-year-old student was given Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine (1969) and Chaim Potok's The Chosen (1967) as part of the eighth-grade literature curriculum. ~ While he enjoyed both novels and was engaged by the themes the authors communicated to him

as a reader, he spontaneously ranked the novels in terms of literary quality. When asked how he had made his evaluations, he answered by differentiating between the themes that 'had most to do with me' and those that did not, and described which parts of the books he understood best as having had some relationship to his own experience. He then added that although he understood every word of The Chosen, he still thought that the writing in Dandelion Wine was of higher quality. When asked what he meant, he said that the author, Ray Bradbury, was able to get across his meaning in a more effective way: 'He's like an artist, you [the reader] become engaged with the themes and with the writing, too.' Increased awareness of both self and story meaning had progressively led this adolescent boy to a general sensitivity to literature and to a capability to engage in literary criticism, including that very difficult thematic interpretation required by the analysis of symbols in poetry.

When we observe the beginnings of literacy in childhood, we become better able to understand that reading competence is not just the result of technique-teaching. True reading com, petence (literacy) is an appreciation of an art form, a sensitivity that matures in the growing child. Technique-teaching that ignores literacy tends to stifle the child's natural endeavours to reach either for an aesthetic sense or for ration- ality. Good teaching, like good writing, is es- sentially good communication. To be a good writer, one must communicate with the reader. Similarly, the teacher must communicate with her students about the goals of reading--most especially storybook themes--which implies listening to what the child at various ages and stages in his life makes of storybook meaning. �9

N o t e s I. The observations on which this article is based were

carried out as part of a larger project on children's spontaneous reactions to reading materials (Bettelheim and Zelan, 1982). The behaviour of children learning to read was recorded by classroom observers who

5 6 Karen Zelan

attempted to respect the events of a normal school day. T h e children's statements about what they were reading and their reading mistakes were taken down verbatim�9 Approximately 3oo children from kindergarten to the third grade were observed�9 T he children came from varying ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds since the schools they attended were integrated. T he children whose reading and conversation about reading is given here had been evaluated by their teachers as competent readers for their age-group.

2. Much reading instruction in the United States has recently been focused on the chitd who cannot or who will not read. All sorts of techniques and strategies have been suggested to remedy this state of affairs. In the multitude of suggestions, the purposes of reading have been partially lost�9 American educators tend to focus on remedies more than purposes because they are faced with large numbers of non-reading children. This tends to soften our focus on the purposes of reading, which (to name several) can be an increase in the understanding of oneself in the world, or of other people in regard to oneself, or an increase in knowledge. There is no point in mastering reading techniques if the purpose of reading becomes lost in technique mastery. Observations of competent children reading, who re- veal an initial and continuous interest in, and understanding of the purposes of, reading, can help correct an educational attitude which tends to forget goals and allows itself to be dominated by the multiplicity of possible means to a goal.

3. ' K e n and his Magic Tricks' in Uptown, Downtown, New York, Macmillan, I966.

4. Some children were observed to reject forcefully a story even though they understood its meaning. Pre- cisely because they understood the story theme all too well, they felt obliged to reject what to them were the unpleasant comxotations or implications of a particular theme. Many children, if allowed, would put such a story away and refuse to read any further because of the difficulty in getting beyond this unpleasant understanding and searching for some meaning or positive value in the story.

5. Several children who had been observed in reading instruction as part of the original project (Bettelheim and Zelan, I982) were able to discuss the books they read in literature class when they were older. I t was very interesting to compare what children of 7 or g said about story themes with what these same children said about story meaning four or five years later. I am indebted to one of these youngsters, Saul Zelan, for sharing witb. me his thoughts and feelings about the novels he read in eighth grade.

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Thoughts on what children bring to reading