Choosing and Using Fiction and Non-Fiction 3-11

A Comprehensive Guide for Teachers and Student Teachers

Margaret Mallett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351385343
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Choosing and Using Fiction and Non-Fiction 3-11 is a guide for primary teachers to the many kinds of texts children encounter, use and enjoy in their nursery and primary school years, providing an invaluable insight into the literature available. Addressing important issues and allowing for the voices of teachers, reviewers and children to be heard, it contains suggestions of best practice which offer a more creative approach to learning.

Including both fiction and non-fiction, with genres ranging from picturebooks to biographies, this fully updated second edition features:

• New coverage on recent books
• Discussion of new changes in concepts of literacy, particularly focused on technological advances in moving image media and virtual worlds
• The balance between print and screen-based texts on developing children's visual and multimodal literacy
• Annotated booklists for each genre for different age groups
• New sections on equality, diversity and translation

Exploring fiction, non-fiction and poetry, Choosing and Using Fiction and Non-Fiction 3-11 is an invaluable resource, supporting teachers as they help children on their journey to becoming insightful and critical readers of non-fiction, and sensitive and reflective readers of fiction.

Part I

Fiction

Chapter 1

Introduction to Part I

When someone writes about fiction they are usually thinking about texts which draw on invention and the inner world of the imagination, often using figurative language to get meaning across. What do we look for in such texts? It depends on the reader’s age, their maturity, interests and tastes but we might seek things like a strong plot, interesting and convincing characters, language that is alive and powerful and well-described settings providing virtual experience of other times and environments. But we would also want to find, in some books in the collection at least, things relevant to a wide range of human issues, tapping into feelings of love and hate, joy and sadness, life and death, so that our feelings are engaged. And we want some books that amaze, startle or change our view of the world. If we want to gather less bookish young learners into the readers’ fold, we need some books that are above all entertaining, whatever other merits they might have. So in the chapters that follow in this first part of the book, you will find much about ‘classics’ – whether novels, picturebooks or poetry – and much about more recent books of the type often called ‘quality children’s literature’. You will also find some suggestions for lighter reads and for ‘popular culture’ texts, including some that are multimodal and/or multimedia. All this is to come; here I want to consider what fiction, whatever its form, offers the growing child. Perhaps the place to start is at the very beginnings of the capacity for cultural activity. Here many teachers have found inspiration in Donald Winnicott’s books – Playing and Reality, for example – in which he locates the origins of this capacity in a child’s early play. Where early play is satisfying and creative the growth of a special ‘space for living’ that is not properly described as ‘inner’ or ‘outer’ but is in fact intermediate between the two is encouraged (Winnicott, 1971: 106). The child that plays happily and creatively is actually growing a space for the enjoyment of cultural experiences, including reading fiction, that will sustain through life. Parents and teachers can help expand and nourish this by providing a rich range of books and making them a natural and pleasing part of everyday life.

Stories are one of the types of fiction offered first to children. Since narrative is a basic way of making sense of experience the chronological structure of a story is familiar to even the youngest children. As Margaret Meek argues so convincingly, fictive narrative has much to teach older children too about ‘the different ways that language lets a writer tell, and the many different ways a reader reads’ (Meek, 1988: 21).

Novels and stories that appeal to the inner world of the imagination are of huge benefit to the growing child. They can help ease the loneliness of the human condition as stories offer accounts of other lives and what it is like to grow up in different circumstances and societies to our own. Stories can reach over time and space and find something universal to share about being human. It can be a comfort to find that others have felt lonely, worried and fearful and have had difficulty in thinking positively about themselves. Books about characters overcoming these things with resourcefulness are well liked by children, which helps explain the popularity of Jacqueline Wilson’s Tracy Beaker series and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Reading books like these, even where as in the Harry Potter books they occur in a secondary world, can echo children’s own preoccupations, allowing them to reflect on them at a distance from their everyday reality. So instead of facing problems as raw lived experience, the reader can take on the challenges vicariously. In the classroom, many issues are best raised through a novel or story. We must remember that in all sorts of subtle and complex ways fiction socializes young listeners and readers, by revealing what is valued, feared and disapproved of in their culture. Becoming aware of this is part of becoming a critical reader and a mature human being. By seeking out the deep meanings in a text, often with the help of others in the classroom, children will develop their capacity for critical reading.

Another huge benefit of reading fiction is the exposure it gives to powerful, interesting and, sometimes, aesthetically pleasing uses of language. The language in a book may be conversational and full of convincing everyday dialogue and the rhythms of everyday speech or lyrical, fresh and original. It is the choice of language used by the writer in a work of fiction that brings alive the adventures, feelings and dilemmas of the characters. This is why reading aloud is so important for all children. They can concentrate on the language and the story while the teacher reads. It is particularly important that less forward or more reluctant readers have these opportunities. Hearing stories read aloud reveals how stories are crafted, which can help children find their own writing ‘voice’ too.

One thing I have kept in mind when recommending texts is that, like adults, children read at different levels at different times – to suit their mood. Nine-year-old Alice told me she loves the books of Michael Morpurgo and was taken to see War Horse at the National Theatre, ‘but sometimes I like to read my Beano’, she added. Children have a right, just like adults, to have preferences and to make choices about what they read. What we try to do is help them to explain and justify their opinions and judgements with reference to the text. It is not going to be the worthy and bland books, plays and films that are likely to entice the young. The disturbing, risky and frightening book has a place too in making readers.

A number of teachers and specialists in children’s literature have shown us that texts themselves teach (Benton and Fox, 1985; Chambers, 1991; Meek, 1988). Children learn by reading, for example, what to expect from certain kinds of book and that characters do not always say what they mean and so you have to read between the lines or infer meanings. Texts often have different levels of meaning too and so returning to a text read when you were younger it may ‘mean’ differently when you return to it later. Reader response approaches like that of Benton and Fox and Martin and Leather show convincingly how children bring their personal life experience to interpreting texts (Benton and Fox, 1985; Martin and Leather, 1994). But response can be deepened by well-chosen activities and a teacher’s sensitivity and enthusiasm can make the difference for some young readers. How do teachers decide which activities are worthwhile? Here I have always found helpful two questions which I trace back to a book by Michael Benton and Geoff Fox, Teaching Literature, written way back in the 1980s. They are: ‘Will this activity enable the reader to look back on the texts and to develop meanings already made?’; ‘Does what I plan to do bring reader and text closer together, or does it come between them?’ (Benton and Fox, 1985: 108).

Text

Alliteration – the repetition of consonant sounds in a sequence in prose or poetry for emphasis or effect.

Classic – books that hold their appeal for more than one generation of readers.

Cohesion – the way different parts of a text connect to communicate.

Discourse – any stretch of language longer than a sentence.

Genre – a kind or type of text bound by rules and conventions.

Iconotext – where text and illustration are intended to complement each other.

Inference – grasping meaning that is implied rather than made fully explicit in a text.

Intertextuality – where allusions to other texts are made within one text.

Metacognition – the awareness a person has of how they have come to know something.

Metafictive – a term applied to a postmodern kind of book, picturebook or novel which in creating a story, at the same time, comments on the very process of its creation.

Metalanguage – a linguistic term meaning terminology to talk about language.

Metaliteracy – how children talk about the way in which they read literature. It is used by Arizpe and Styles, when they observed children’s reading and comments on picturebooks (Arizpe and Styles, 2003).

Metaphor – a literary device identifying one thing with another; the qualities of the first thing carry over into the second. ‘He was the lion of the group.’

Multimedia – a communication combining different media, as in a CD-ROM with moving images, sound and graphics.

Multimodal – a communication is multimodal when it combines image, writing and design.

Narrative – chronologically ordered text.

Polysemic – capable of different interpretations of the message and often used to refer to picturebooks which are multi-layered.

Postmodern – the art, literature and thinking which is in reaction to modernism. Primary teachers, pupils and parents are perhaps most likely to be confronted by postmodernism when they read contemporary picturebooks. (See Lewis, 2001: 94–101.)

Reader-response theory – to do with how readers respond to and make sense of texts. This set of ideas is associated with literary scholars like Wolfgang Iser (The Act of Reading, 1978) and Stanley Fish (Is There a Text in this Class?, 1980). The basic question is something like – how far is meaning in the text and how far is it the creation of the reader? (See Gamble and Yates, 2008: 16–17.)

Semantic levels – the different levels of meaning from straightforward to more sophisticated. More than one reading is often necessary to tap into the deeper meanings.

Semiotics – a branch of linguistics concerned with the transmission of meaning through signs and symbols.

Simile – a figure of speech which makes a comparison nearly always using either ‘like’ or ‘as’.

Surrealist – this twentieth-century movement in art and literature is suggestive of the content of the unconscious mind. It intrudes into picturebooks where we find dreamlike and sometimes distorted images like those in McKee’s I Hate My Teddy Bear.

Symbol – something representing something else. Symbols may be culture specific. (See Lewis, 2001: 114.)

Illustration

Bleeding (of pictures) – the extension of illustrations to the very edge of the page.

Colour (hue) and tone – the media chosen will affect the tone and atmosphere of the picture. Pen and ink, line and wash, watercolours and collage are traditional choices. But modern illustrators, like Lauren Child, use new technology to create their pictures, often scanning and manipulating images and mixing colours on the computer.

Composition – the way in which people and things are placed on the page.

Double spread – a picture which covers two adjacent pages.

Endpapers – pages at the beginning and end of a book on which there may be decoration or images to do with the themes of the book.

Hatching – a term used to describe the parallel lines used to darken areas of a picture as in the work of Charles Keeping and Edward Ardizzone.

Iconotext – where written text and illustrations are intended to complement each other.

Interanimation – where words and images work together to create meaning as in picturebooks, comic strips and graphic novels.

Landscape – a format in which the pages of a book or a canvass are a rectangle with the longer sides in a horizontal position.

Line – an illustrator aims to develop a distinctive way of drawing which makes their work immediately recognizable. An artist’s line may be heavy and bold like that of John Lawrence (see for example This Little Chick) or light and sensitive like that of John Burningham (see for example The Magic Bed).

Modulation – an artist’s varying of colour and tone.

Movable – a novelty book with movable parts: flaps to open, tabs to pull and perhaps wheels to turn.

Picturebook – a book which combines p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of boxes
• List of case studies
• Acknowledgements
• Acknowledgements for second edition
• Preface
• Author biographies
• Prologue
• PART I: FICTION
• PART II: NON-FICTION
• Bibliography
• Useful information and websites
• Index