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The Construction of Literary Understanding by First and Second Graders in Oral Response toPicture Storybook Read-AloudsAuthor(s): Lawrence R. SipeSource: Reading Research Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Apr. - May - Jun., 2000), pp. 252-275Published by: International Reading AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/748077 .Accessed: 02/10/2011 14:37

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Reading Research Quarterly Vol. 35, No. 2

April/May/June 2000

?2000 International Reading Association (pp. 252-275)

"The construction of literary understanding by first and second graders in oral response

to picture storybook read-alouds

Lawrence R. Sipe University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

uring the past 20 years, we have learned a great deal about how reading stories to children promotes their literacy development (Sulzby & Teale, 1991). Reading to children

has been shown to powerfully engage many different

types of literacy learning (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1985). Specific benefits include the development of a love of books (Holdaway, 1979) and the form-

ing of emotional attachments with caregivers (Bus, 1993), understanding the difference between oral language and decontextualized book language that does not relate to the child's immediate physical world (Snow, 1983), and the development of a sense of story structure and narrative (Phillips & McNaughton, 1990). Reading aloud to children enhances knowledge of the conventions of print (Clay, 1991), vocabulary development and listening com-

prehension (Dickinson & Smith, 1994; Elley, 1989; Feitelson, Kita, & Goldstein, 1986; Morrow, 1990); and

decoding and reading comprehension (Rosenhouse, Feitelson, Kita, & Goldstein, 1997). In his extensive longitudinal study, Wells (1986) found that the number of stories children had heard read to them was the single greatest predictor of later success in reading.

But although learning to read and learning to read literature cannot be easily separated (Sawyer, 1987), research on storybook reading in classrooms with young children has seldom focused on literary understanding.

When researchers have focused on literary understand-

ing, it has often been understood in a somewhat restrict- ed way as knowledge of the traditional elements of narrative (Cianciolo & Quirk, 1993) or central narrative elements (Baumann & Bergeron, 1993), that is, plot, set-

ting, characters, and theme. From this traditional perspective, children develop literary understanding by learning to identify these components or aspects of narrative and by then using these elements to understand how a story works. Literary understanding can, however, be conceptualized in a broader, richer, and more textured way.

This article reports on a 7-month descriptive study of the construction of literary understanding by a class of first- and second-grade children as suggested by their oral

responses during read-alouds of picture storybooks. While not ignoring the traditional elements of narrative, the construct of literary understanding on which this

study is based draws from theories of semiotics, visual aesthetic theory, schema and cognitive flexibility theory, and a range of theories of contemporary literary criticism. Elements from these theories are integrated by a unifying theoretical perspective of literary understanding as a social construction. The research question for the study was What is the nature of the literary understanding of a class of first and second graders, as indicated by their verbal

responses during storybook read-alouds?

252

AIBSRIC

The construction of literary understanding by first and second graders in oral response to picture storybook read-alouds

In the context of the common, but potentially rich situation of classroom storybook readalouds, this study describes what constituted literary understanding for one classroom interpretive community of first and second graders by analyzing their oral responses as picture storybooks were read aloud to them. Over seven months, field notes and transcripted audiotapes of 83 readalouds were collected; 45 representative readalouds were selected for intensive analysis. The findings indicated five types of literary understanding: (a) textual analysis, (b) intertextual connections, (c) personal connections, (d) becoming engaged in the story to such an extent that the world of the story and the children's world were transparent to each other, and (e) using the text as a platform or pretext for creative expression. A grounded theory of literary understanding was developed, differ- entiating and relating the five aspects of literary understanding by (a)

the stances assumed by the children, (b) the actions performed by the children and (c) the various functions of the text. The five aspects were further conceptualized as the enactments of three basic literary impulses that interact synergistically. The hermeneutic impulse is the drive to understand the story and interpret it. The aesthetic impulse consists of either receptively responding to the story as a lived-through experience or using the story as the platform for one's own creative expression. The personalizing impulse is the impulse to link the story to the self and personal experience. The study suggests that the impressive literary critical abilities of children as young as first and second grade are appropriately understood through a wide variety of theoretical perspectives. The resulting grounded theory unifies and integrates these perspectives as well as focuses specifically on the literary understanding of young children.

La construcci6n de la comprensi6n literaria por niiios de primero y segundo grado en respuestas orales a libros de cuentos ilustrados leidos en voz alta

En el contexto de la comin, pero potencialmente rica situaci6n de lectura de cuentos en voz alta en el aula, este estudio describe lo que constituy6 la comprensi6n literaria para la comunidad de un aula de nihios de primero y segundo grado, analizando las respuestas orales a libros de cuentos ilustrados que les fueron leidos en voz alta. Durante siete meses, se recolectaron notas de campo y trans- cripciones de 83 lecturas en voz alta audiograbadas. Se selec- cionaron 45 lecturas en voz alta representativas para ser analizadas en profundidad. Los hallazgos indicaron cinco tipos de comprensi6n literaria: (a) analisis textual, (b) conexiones intertextuales, (c) conexiones personales, (d) involucrarse en la historia a tal punto que el mundo de la historia y el mundo del niiio se volvieron transpar- entes y (e) usar el texto como plataforma o pretexto para la expre- si6n creativa. Se desarroll6 una teoria fundamentada de la compren- si6n literaria, diferenciando y relacionando los cinco aspectos de la

comprensi6n literaria por medio de (a) las posiciones asumidas por los niios, (b) las acciones llevadas a cabo por los nihios y (c) las varias funciones del texto. Los cinco aspectos se conceptualizaron como las realizaciones de tres impulsos literarios basicos que inter- actdan en sinergia. El impulso hermendutico es la tendencia a com- prender la historia e interpretarla. El impulso estitico consiste en responder receptivamente a la historia como una experiencia vivida o bien usar la historia como plataforma para la propia expresi6n creativa. El impulso personalizador es el impulso de vincular la historia con uno mismo y la experiencia personal. El estudio sugiere que las impresionantes habilidades criticas literarias de los nifios, adn desde primero y segundo grado, pueden comprenderse adecuada- mente a traves de una amplia variedad de perspectivas te6ricas. La teoria resultante unifica e integra estas perspectivas y se centra es- pecificamente en la comprensi6n literaria de los niios pequefios.

Der Aufbau von Lese- und Schreibverstandnis der Erst- und ZweitklaBler bei deren mundlicher Wiedergabe nach lautem Vorlesen aus Bilderbuchern

Im Zusammenhang der allgemein Oiblichen, jedoch potentiell reich- haltigen Situation von lautem Vorlesen im Klassenraum aus Bochern beschreibt diese Studie, was unter Lese- und Schreibverstindnis in der interpretativen Gemeinschaft eines Klassenraumes von Erst- und

Zweitkl•ilern durch Analysieren ihrer mtindlichen Wiedergaben sich konstituierte, wihrend ihnen aus Bilderbichern laut vorgelesen wurde. Uber die Dauer von sieben Monaten wurden Notizen und ins Schriftliche Obertragene, besprochene Audio-Tonbinder von 83 lau- ten Vorlesungen gesammelt; 45 reprisentative Vorlesungen wurden

ffir eine intensive Analyse ausgewihlt. Die Ergebnisse deuteten auf finf Arten des Lese- und Schreibverstehens: (a) textliche Analyse; (b) inter-textliche Verbindungen; (c) pers6nliche Verbindungen; (d) Engagement und Anteilnahme an der Erzihlung bis zu einem Grade, dalS die Welt der Erzdhlung und die Welt der Kinder zueinander transarent wurden; und (e) Benutzung des Textes als Grundlage oder Vorlage zum kreativen Ausdruck. Eine in sich begrOindete Theorie des Lese- und Schreibverstindnisses wurde entwickelt, durch Unterscheiden voneinander und in Bezugsetzung dieser fonf Aspekte des Lese- und Schreibverstdndnisses zueinander, durch (a)

die von den Kindern aufgenommenen Stanzen; (b) die von den Kindern ausgefihrten Aktionen; und (c) die unterschiedlichen Funktionen des Textes. Die ftinf Aspekte wurden weiter als das Nachvollziehen von drei grundlegenden Lese- und Schreibimpulsen konzeptualisiert, die untereinander und gegenseitig synergetisch in Beziehung stehen. Der hermeneutische Impuls ist der Antrieb zum Verstehen der Geschichte und zur Interpretation. Der dsthetische Impuls besteht entweder aus rezeptiver Erwiderung auf die Geschichte als eine durchlebte Erfahrung oder aus der Nutzung der

Erzihlung als Plattform fir den eigenen kreativen Ausdruck. Der per- sonifizierte Impuls ist der Impuls, die Erzihlung mit sich selbst und eigener pers6nlicher Erfahrung zu verbinden. Die Studie schligt vor, dagl die eindrucksvollen kritischen Lese- und Schreibfihigkeiten der Kinder bereits im frihen Alter der ersten und zweiten Klasse durch eine breite Variation von theoretischen Perspektiven angemessen verstanden werden. Die im Ergebnis begrdindete Theorie vereinigt und integriert diese Perspektiven und richtet ihren Blick ebenfalls besonders auf das Lese- und Schreibverstehen von jungen Kindern.

253

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La construction de la comprehension de la litterarite par des eleves de premiere et seconde ann'e dans des reponses orales lors de lectures a haute voix de livres d'histoire en images

Dans le contexte, banal mais riche, d'une situation de lecture i haute voix de livres d'histoire, cette recherche d&crit comment s'est effec- tu&e la comprehension de la litterarite dans une communaut6 sco- laire interpretative d'enfants de premiere et seconde annee en analysant leurs reponses orales alors qu'on leur lisait des livres 'a haute voix. Pendant sept mois, on a pris des notes de terrain et trans- crit les bandes audio de 83 lectures i haute voix qui avaient ete col- lect6es; on a s6lectionn6 45 lectures i haute voix en vue d'une analyse approfondie. Les resultats montrent cinq types de comprehension de la litt&rarit&: a) analyse textuelle; b) connexions in- tertextuelles; c) connexions personnelles; d) engagement progressif dans l'histoire jusqu'a ce que le monde de l'histoire et le monde de l'enfant soient transparents l'un pour l'autre; e) utilisation du texte comme plate-forme ou pr6texte pour une expression cr6ative. On a

developpe une th6orie de terrain de la comprehension de la litterarite, en diff6renciant et mettant en relation les cinq aspects de la com-

prehension de la litterarit6 par a) les positions prises par les enfants; b) les actions effectuees par les enfants; et c) les diffirentes fonctions du texte. Les cinq aspects ont et6 ensuite conceptualis6s comme manifestations de trois impulsions litteraires fondamentales qui in- teragissent en synergie. L'impulsion hermineutique est la pulsion pour comprendre l'histoire et l'interpr6ter. L'impulsion esthetique consiste soit I r~pondre receptivement I l'histoire en tant qu'experience vecue, soit i utiliser l'histoire comme plate-forme pour sa pro- pre expression creative. L'impulsion de personnalisation est l'impulsion consistant a lier l'histoire a soi et i son experience personnelle. La recherche suggere que les impressionnantes capacitis litteraires critiques d'enfants aussi jeunes que des enfants de premiere et deuxieme ann6e peuvent etre apprehendies par toutes sortes de perspectives theoriques. La theorie de terrain produite unifie et in- tigre ces perspectives tout autant qu'elle se centre sp6cifiquement sur la compr6hension litteraire des jeunes enfants.

254

Perspectives on literary understanding: Theory and research

In reviewing theory and research that provide various perspectives on how young children (i.e., children younger than third grade) understand and respond to literature, I argue for a multifaceted conception of literary understanding, considering theories of narrative representation and structuralist approaches, reader-response theory, and several other literary critical approaches. In discussing research on young children's responses to literature, I focus on longitudinal studies situated in the home, preschool studies, and studies in the primary grades.

Story models and structuralist approaches Theories of narrative representation (Graesser,

Golding, & Long, 1991) draw on the insight of schema theory (Anderson & Pearson, 1984) that cognitive structures (schemata) organize and interpret new information and are in turn modified by this new information. Story maps and story grammars (Graesser et al., 1991; Meyer & Rice, 1984) propose models of specific cognitive structures for the comprehension of narrative. One of the most recent of these models, by Golden and Rumelhart (1993), conceptualizes the reader's task as following the narrative trajectory of a story by filling in the gaps in the narrative: "story comprehension is defined as the prob- lem of inferring the most probable missing features from the partially specified story trajectory" (p. 203). The emphasis in the Golden and Rumelhart model is thus on what is not in the story and what must be supplied by the active reader.

These models have several limitations. First, they are usually based on very simple, short stories without illustrations that were written by the researchers for the express purpose of developing and explaining the models. Thus, these stories may not reflect the length or the com- plexity of stories used in classrooms. Second, because of their focus on textual features rather than on the qualities of readers, story grammar maps and models do not ex- plain how readers may reach different, but equally valid interpretations. Third, as Miall and Kuiken (1994) have argued, theories of narrative representation attempt to "economize comprehension, postulating that the mind takes the shortest route through the maze of meanings in a story" (p. 349), whereas literary texts have the opposite goal, which is to evoke multifaceted meanings.

Despite these limitations, explicit instruction in story mapping has been shown to have a positive effect on the understanding of narrative (Dimino, Gersten, Camine, & Blake, 1990; Spiegel & Fitzgerald, 1986). Baumann and Bergeron (1993) were the first to study story mapping

with children who were younger than Grade 3; they studied the relative effects of four different treatments of instruction in story mapping on first-grade children's comprehension of plot, setting, characters, and theme, concluding that explicit instruction in story mapping was effective as measured both by the children's answers on tests and by qualitative analysis of interviews of the children. The Baumann and Bergeron study is also notable for its use of trade books of children's literature rather than stories written specifically for clinical use.

With the use of structuralist literary criticism (Scholes, 1974), stories may also be viewed as stimulating the perception of formal patterns (e.g., the home-away- home pattern represented in Whbere the Wild Things Are [Sendak, 19631, or binary opposites like good/evil or beauty/ugliness), which are useful for understanding how the story works. Cognitive flexibility theory (Spiro, Coulson, Feltovich, & Anderson, 1994), as applied to story knowledge, suggests that readers build up knowledge gradually across cases, as they read (or listen to) many stories and extract similarities and commonalities across them. Stories in the same genre (e.g., fairy tales) could be used by the learner to build up a cognitive representation or schema for fairy tales. Structural theorists such as Vladimir Propp (1958) have described how the structure of various traditional stories can be reduced to a series of propositions or events that are common to all the variants of a certain story. Hearing variants of the Cinderella story, for example, could enable children to build up a Cinderella schema.

Lehr (1991) investigated how kindergarten and second- and fourth-grade children with both high and low levels of exposure to literature understood the complex element of theme in stories. She found that the kindergarten children were able to identify books that had similar themes, but that the themes of realistic fiction were much more likely to be identified correctly than the themes of folk tales. Lehr also found that kindergarten children were able to summarize stories and understand the motivations of characters. All of Lehr's interactions with the children were one to one; a social construction- ist approach would suggest that, in groups, children might be able to reach even higher levels of abstraction and generalization in identifying theme.

Perspectives from reader-response theory From the perspective of literary criticism, the last 25

years have seen a major shift in emphasis from the solely text-based approaches (asserting that a text has only one correct meaning) of the New Critics (Ransom, 1941) to more subjective approaches (asserting that there are multiple meanings) that focus on readers, under the umbrella term reader-response theory (Beach, 1993). What these

Construction of literary understanding 255

theories have in common is their assertion that the reader actively constructs meaning; they reject the idea of any single, objective meaning in a text. Because all readers bring different experiences to a text, assume different stances toward it, and understand it through their own unique cultural and psychological filters, reader-response theory assumes a rich diversity of response. Some forms of reader-response theory understand readers as both constrained and enabled by the rules of the interpretive communities to which they belong (Fish, 1980), thus adding an important social element.

In the more extreme of the reader-response positions, readers are thought to read themselves into any text (Bleich, 1978; Holland, 1975), and the primacy of the subjective experience of literature is asserted. In more moderate positions, readers are described as transacting with a text (Rosenblatt, 1978), assuming various stances along a continuum; these stances shape responses. Readers may read in order to take some information away from the text, or to analyze its formal properties; Rosenblatt called this the efferent stance (1978). On the other end of the continuum, readers may read simply to engage in a lived-through experience of the text, entering the text, as it were, and experiencing its literary power. Rosenblatt referred to this type of stance as aesthetic (1978). For Rosenblatt, meaning is not found in the text, but is constructed by the reader.

Other reader-response theories emphasize the activity of filling in the gaps or indeterminacies in a text by making inferences and revising those inferences. From the perspective of these theories, literary understanding involves the tracing of the reader's personal responses and the ways in which readers construct meaning by mentally supplying what is not contained in the text. (Iser's [1978] ideas of gaps in the text are thus similar to the model of story comprehension by Golden and Rumelhart [1993].) Literary understanding also involves the flexibility of a "wandering viewpoint" (Iser, 1978, p. 108), as readers place themselves within one character's perspective, take on the perspectives of several characters in turn, or align themselves with the narrator.

Perspectives from other literary theories The concept of intertextuality has been used by sev-

eral theorists and researchers in literacy. The term was coined by Kristeva (1980), a semiotician and psychoana- lyst, who used the term to refer not only to the ways in which written and visual texts were interrelated, but also to the text of one's own life, as a collection of various overlapping experiences. Fairclough (1992) suggested that all spoken utterances and written texts "are inherently intertextual, constituted by elements of other texts" (p. 170). Hartman (1995) suggested that "a reader's understanding

transcends his or her comprehension of any single pas- sage" (p. 520) because good readers always link what they are currently reading to what they have read before.

Some theorists emphasized the essentially social nature of intertextuality. Bloome and Egan-Robertson (1993) argued that intertextuality is present in the social interactions among participants. Lemke (1992) asserted that the specific language and cultural systems in any given learning environment determine what intertextual connections are available and valorized there. Rowe (1997) concurred, noting that in her read-alouds and conversation with preschoolers, she tended to privilege book-to-book connections over other types of connections.

Some views of intertextuality are quite broad, en- compassing all of the various connections readers make to written texts, including connections to their personal lives: "a form of dialogue with the total texts of the reader's experiences" (Cairney, 1990, p. 480). In these views, intertextuality becomes a heuristic metaphor for learning itself, as a matter of links and connections in a web of meaning (Short, 1992), and the self is considered a collection of imbricated chunks of meaning that coalesce into organized narratives (Kamberelis & Scott, 1992). Thus, in reading literature, we may connect the story (or stories) of our lives to the story we are reading. There may, however, be equal value in understanding intertextuality in a more limited and specialized way, separating out links to personal experiences from links to cultural products like books, advertisements, movies, television programs, paintings, or other discrete arrays of signs. For example, Many and Anderson (1992) distinguished between intertextual responses and "autobiographical responses" (p. 60) in their study of elementary and middle school children's responses to short stories. From this perspective, the text of one's personal life experiences is qualitatively different from cultural products of which one may be aware. It is this more specialized and limited concept of intertextuality--links between the text at hand and other cultural products-that is used in the study reported here.

Some postmodern literary theory suggests that readers may view a text as a collection of signifiers capable of infinitely varied interpretations (Derrida, 1989). From this perspective, the text becomes a playground for the reader's inventive capabilities, and readers can engage in a joyful, anarchic, and sometimes subversive exploration of text without paying primary attention to what the author of the text may have intended (Bakhtin, 1984; Barthes, 1987), deliberately misreading a text (Bloom, 1975), or even playfully interpreting it through a series of puns (Hartman, 1970). The types of literary pleasure experienced by readers have been explored as (a) the pleasure of seeing one's world mirrored and affirmed in literature

256 READING RESEARCH QUARTERLY April/May/June 2000 35/2

and (b) the pleasure of being surprised, unsettled, and even enraptured or ravished (Barthes, 1976). What counts as literary understanding changes when children's responses are viewed through these contemporary literary theories. From the traditional view that literary understanding comprises a knowledge of narrative elements like plot, characters, setting, and theme, certain responses might be considered simply off task. However, these same responses might be prized and positively valued from the perspective of a broader and more inclusive conceptualization of literary understanding afforded by these theories.

Young children's responses to literature Research on children's developing literary under-

standing in the home, in the company of parents and sib- lings, provides a unique perspective on the ways children come to understand and respond to stories. Such studies are usually longitudinal and intensive, following children from a very young age through preschool and the primary grades. The studies are also concerned with children in extremely rich literacy environments, in which the parents value literature and read to children a great deal. White (1954/1984), a children's librarian, reported in di- ary form on her daughter's responses to books from age 2 to 5, emphasizing both how the child used her life experiences to understand stories and how she used stories to understand her life. Butler (1980) recorded the importance of storybook reading in the development of her physically and perceptually handicapped granddaughter from the time books were first introduced at 4 months to the time the child was nearly 4 years old. Crago and Crago (1983) wrote of their daughter's responses to stories from the time she was 12 months old to age 5, discussing her developing understanding of story structure, illustration content, and style, and her increasing ability to separate the story world from the real world.

The most theoretically sophisticated (and recent) study, that of Wolf and Heath (1992), drew on the rich literary experiences of Wolf's two daughters over a 9-year period. Wolf and Heath asserted that the braid of literature consisted of three strands for these children: the ways they connected stories with reality, their creativity in interpreting ordinary life from the perspective of stories, and their increasing ability to think critically about both fact and fiction. For these girls, narrative was a cru- cial way of organizing experience (Bruner, 1980); they used stories to interpret, control, and cope with life. With their parents, they became "partners in analysis" (p. 174), both of stories and everyday experience.

Cochran-Smith's (1984) longitudinal study of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds focused on the daily storybook read- aloud sessions at her preschool research site. This study

is notable for the extensive use of literary theory in examining the children's responses. For example, Cochran- Smith used Barthes's (1974) concept of a cultural code, which refers to the broad cultural and social knowledge that most adult readers access unconsciously while reading. This is precisely the type of knowledge that young children lack, and that the storyreaders supplied while reading. Thus the storyreaders helped the children to make life-text connections: "reader exchanges aimed at helping children use their knowledge in order to make sense of literature" (p. 183). Children and their caregivers also made text-life connections by using stories to interpret or understand events in real life. This work suggests that hearing stories read aloud may be a crucible in which children's literary awareness is forged.

Rowe (1998) investigated the uses 2- and 3-year-old children made of books in their sociodramatic play in both preschool and home settings. As books were being read, children would dramatize parts of the narrative, often using toys that were in reach to symbolize story characters. They played out favorite parts of books as well as parts about which they had questions or confusions. They also used dramatic play to enact intertextual connections among a wide variety of sign systems. Rowe argued that this play was "a connecting link between the child's world and the adult one represented by books and the book-reading events in which they were embed- ded" (p. 31).

Research on elementary school children's response to literature is abundant (Martinez & Roser, 1991); a good deal of it is in anecdotal formats (May, 1995; Short & Pierce, 1990), and much less of it concerns children younger than third grade. Researchers have found that, given supportive environments, children respond to literature in a great variety of ways, through talk, art, spontaneous drama, and writing (Hickman, 1981; Labbo, 1996; Smagorinsky & Coppock, 1994). Most of this work relies heavily on the theoretical underpinnings of reader- response criticism (primarily Rosenblatt and Iser), though Langer (1995) has developed her own model of literary envisionment, based on four constantly shifting relationships readers have with texts: (a) being out and stepping in, (b) being in and moving through, (c) being in and stepping out, and (d) stepping out and objectifying experience.

Most of the research on the stances readers assume is based directly on Rosenblatt's efferent-aesthetic continuum and refers to the particular set of assumptions and expectations a reader has of a particular text at a particular time (Cox & Many, 1992a, 1992b; Zarillo & Cox, 1992). This body of research is concerned mainly with upper elementary children. A notable exception is the work of Many and Wiseman (1992) and Wiseman, Many, and Altieri (1992) with third graders, which studied the


effects of different teaching approaches on students' re-

sponses to children's literature. The study conducted by Many and Wiseman (1992) had three treatment groups: (a) literary analysis (focused on the efferent stance of identification and interpretation of literary elements), (b) literary experience (focused on providing a lived-through aesthetic experience and personal reaction to the story), and (c) no discussion after the reading of the story. When the groups were asked to write freely about the story, the

literary analysis group tended to write more responses having to do with literary elements, and the literary experience group tended to write responses that indicated they had entered the story world. The group with no discussion tended to write a simple retelling of the story. The Wiseman et al. study (1992), also with third graders, used three instructional approaches: (a) student-centered (with free discussion and no guidance from the researchers), (b) teacher-guided aesthetic treatment (focused on the children's reactions to the story), and (c) teacher-guided aesthetic approach followed by literary analysis (employing an aesthetic treatment followed by discussion that dealt with both literary analysis and personal reaction to the story). When the children were asked to write freely about the story, the student-centered groups tended to focus on literary analysis and seldom produced aesthetic responses. The aesthetic and aesthetic-analysis groups produced many responses that explained their feelings or related the story to their lives-responses the researchers categorized as aesthetic. Since there were no statistically significant differences in the responses of the aesthetic and aesthetic-analysis groups, the researchers concluded that discussion that includes both literary analysis and aesthetic response does not hinder aesthetic response. Cox and Many (1992a) found that student written

responses that

mingled efferent analysis of the work with reports of the richness of the lived-through experience or even lack of such experience, were more mature and meaningful.... Nor do all aesthetic responses embody fuller understanding or interpretation of a work, just as not all efferent responses suggest a lack of it. (p. 117)

The important issue here seems to be the balance between literary analysis and encouraging personal and affective response. Researchers who argue for a shift from analysis to more personal forms of response (McGinley et al., 1997) are reacting to the long-standing emphasis of past literature instruction on analysis to the exclusion of "reading life through texts and texts through life" (p. 63). Rosenblatt (1964) herself argued for the logi- cal and chronological priority of the aesthetic lived- through experience of literature, followed by analysis that serves to heighten (rather than destroy) the literary expe-

rience: analysis not "for its own sake" (p. 128) but to reach higher levels of understanding and appreciation. The conclusion we can draw from this research and theory is that the richest literary understanding will include both personal and analytical components.

There is a growing body of work on classroom discussion about literature, variously called literature circles, book clubs, literature discussion groups, or grand conversations (Daniels, 1994; Eeds & Wells, 1989; Gilles, 1994; McMahon & Raphael, 1997; Raphael & McMahon, 1994; Roller & Beed, 1994; Roser & Martinez, 1995). Most of this research has dealt with children in the upper elementary grades (Grades 4 through 6) or older; it emphasizes the social construction of meaning as it applies to literary experience as well as underlining the importance of free and open discussion, unhindered by heavy teacher control. Researchers have found evidence for the efficacy of a conversational approach to literature as opposed to the "gentle inquisitions" of direct questioning and an emphasis on analysis (Eeds & Wells, 1989, p. 4). Eeds and Wells trained student teachers to conduct literature discussions with fifth and sixth graders, aiming for grand conversations that focused on child-centered talk and personal response that reflected aesthetic reading. They found that talk about the narrative elements of literature emerged naturally in the course of these discussions. They also encouraged the student teachers to feel free to point out literary elements when they felt there was a "Literary Teachable Moment" (Eeds & Wells, 1989, p. 10). Their findings thus support the idea of the interwoven nature of literary lived-through experience and literary analysis.

Turning to research on literature discussion with younger children, Short's (1992) work in literature-rich first- through sixth-grade classrooms demonstrated the wide range of intertextual connections children made in collaborative environments where literature and life were constantly being linked. Over time, the literature circle discussions grew more complex in terms of the connections the children made to "characters, plots, illustrations, themes, language structures and phrases, and story structure" (p. 320) and in terms of the quality and extent of the connections they made to their personal lives. The children also made extensive links to visual texts and the texts of popular culture, especially movies, videos, and television programs. Book-to-book connections were fa- cilitated through the use of story variants and other the- matically related sets of books called text sets (Harste, Short, & Burke, 1988). Roser and Hoffman (1992) extended this work on text sets by examining the use teachers of kindergarten through fifth grade made of language charts that allowed the class to keep a record of high- lights of discussions surrounding storybook read-alouds. The format of the charts was "intended to provoke an


awareness of the links among stories" (pp. 45-46). Roser and Hoffman found that "The use of Language Charts en- courages participants to notice the universals that books share, thus promoting the recognition of connections between and among books" (p. 48).

The work of McGee (1992a; 1992b) is notable for its application of the grand conversations approach to young children. McGee (1992a) audiotaped and transcribed the discussions of first graders following the reading of picture storybooks. She noted that "Readers' responses can be expected to reflect a continuum having at one end responses to the readers' personal experiences and emotions evoked by reading and at the other end responses that reflect attention to the text" (p. 178). McGee's coding of children's responses thus ranged from reader-bound to text-bound statements. McGee (1992b) noted three types of talk structures: (a) mucking about (sharing of ideas that were seemingly unconnected), (b) weaving through (in which children returned to a previous idea in nonsuccessive conversational turns), and (c) focusing in (where succeeding turns seemed to build on each other as the children continued to talk about the same idea).

Research focusing on picture book illustration This review concludes by considering theory and

research about illustrations in picture books; such illustrations are an integral part of the story and are as important as the words (Stewig, 1995). Thus, the literary understanding of picture books incorporates visual aesthetic understanding. Picture books may be conceived (in semiotic terms) as the site of the interaction or transaction between two sign systems: the visual sign system of the illustration sequence and the verbal sign system of the printed words (Nodelman, 1988). In order to understand a picture book, children must integrate these two sign systems, translating the content of one sign system into another in the process of transmediation (Sipe, 1998; Suhor, 1984). Assuming this semiotic stance, Nodelman (1988) argued that we learn to read the sign systems in illustrations just as we learn to read written language, and that the visual and verbal sign systems in picture books function to comment on each other and fill in each other's gaps. A semiotic perspective also suggests that the peritext (Genette, 1980; Higgonet, 1990) of the picture book-all that is not part of the narrative, such as the cover, endpages, and title page-has potential for meaning making. Moebius (1986) has analyzed commonly oc- curring clusters of conventional signs in picture books, referring to these clusters as codes, for example the code of color to represent certain emotions and moods.

Flood and Lapp (1995) observed that "although educators have regularly recognized the importance of

picture books in children's language and literacy development, the relationships between the pictures and the words (the language arts and the visual arts) have not yet been fully explored" (p. 9). Empirical classroom research in this area includes the work of Kiefer (1982), who studied first and second graders' responses to illustrations in picture books, focusing on the aesthetic qualities of their responses. Kiefer adapted Halliday's (1975) categories of language functions in order to describe four types of response: informative, imaginative, heuristic, and personal. In informative response, children reported the contents of the picture or compared the picture to an aspect of the real world. In heuristic response, children wondered about events in the pictures, inferred the causes of pic- tured events or how illustrations were made, and predict- ed outcomes or events from pictures. In imaginative response, children entered the world of the book or created figurative language to describe it. In personal response, children associated their own experiences with the book, expressed their feelings about the book, or evaluated it. Golden and Gerber (1990) investigated the responses of Native American second graders to Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963) as realized text evoked by the potential text afforded by the words and pictures. Madura (1997) has examined how young children talked about picture books in discourse patterns that paralleled the developmental steps of art criticism described by Eisner (1994): description, interpretation, evaluation, and thematic issues.

The study reported here extends the work reviewed above in several ways. It extends the voluminous research on storybook read-alouds by focusing on literary understanding rather than on the development of other literacy knowledge. It adds to the relatively small amount of empirical research on young children's responses to literature in the classroom. The study also extends and refines the reviewed work by taking a broader and more comprehensive view of literary understanding than previous studies; it draws from a wide range of literary theories, theories of literacy, and visual aesthetic theory. Finally, it explores what constituted this understanding for a class of first and second graders and presents a new grounded theory that (a) integrates and synthesizes this broad range of theories and (b) specifically focuses on young children and their oral response to both the text and illustrations in picture books.

Theoretical frame In this study, literary understanding is viewed

through several augmentative theoretical lenses. From the perspective provided by structuralist literary criticism and theories of narrative representation, literary understanding


consists of the gradual growth of knowledge about story structure and the way stories work, by hearing many stories and making meaningful connections among them. In this way, children refine, extend, and modify their schemata for various literary genres and form cognitive links among them.

From a reader-response perspective, literary under-

standing involves the tracing of readers' personal re-

sponses and associations with a text. Readers (a) bring their own life experiences to bear in interpreting texts and (b) use texts to understand and shape their lives.

Literary understanding also involves the various perspectives readers may take, and the various stances they may assume. An intertextual perspective suggests that any given text may be interpreted within the matrix of other texts: stories and other arrays of signs like television programs, paintings, advertisements, and videos. According to some postmodern literary critical theories, literary un-

derstanding consists of the sometimes playful, sometimes subversive manipulation of the elements of a text for the readers' own exercise of control, pleasure, and delight. In the case of picture books, literary understanding also includes knowing how pictures, words, and peritextual features may be used to make meaning.

The comprehensive view of literary understanding that has just been sketched for this study is given unity and coherence by the social constructivist paradigm (Schwandt, 1994). Because human beings socially construct their understanding of the world (and of literature) primarily by the social interaction afforded by language (Vygotsky, 1986), one important way of understanding children's meaning making is to analyze their talk (in this case, the talk during storybook read-alouds). This talk is situated in specific social contexts (in this case, the read- aloud situation of the classroom), and thus understanding the context is an important part of understanding the talk (Golden, 1988; Gumperz, 1986). Children (and their teacher) together construct their own implicit definition of literary competence (Culler, 1975) within the con- straints and opportunities of their interpretive community (Fish, 1980). This interpretive community may be most

richly described through multiple theoretical lenses. The

significance of this study thus lies in its comprehensive and textured view of young children's literary under-

standing in the socially dynamic situation of interactive storybook read-alouds.

Method This study was descriptive, qualitative, and natural-

istic, situated in the constructivist research paradigm (Guba & Lincoln, 1994). In this research paradigm, the goal is to richly describe and interpret complex social

phenomena in natural settings (Schwandt, 1994). Researchers are not understood simply as an objective and dispassionate camera for recording data, but rather

interpret the data through the lens of their own subjectiv- ity and intellectual background, becoming part of the situation they study (Atkinson & Hammersley, 1994). Researchers in the constructivist research paradigm do not approach data with rigid a priori theoretical expectations, but rather build a grounded theory based on the

conceptual relationships they construct from the data (Glaser & Strauss, 1967).

The research site: The school The study was conducted in a public elementary

school (kindergarten through fifth grade), located in a

working-class residential community that was part of a

large midwestern U.S. city. The school had an articulated

philosophy of informal instruction, based on the British

Primary Schools model (MacKenzie & Kernig, 1975), and a 20-year history of using children's literature to teach

reading. Students and teachers were quite accustomed to visitors and researchers because the school had been the site of several previous studies and had been chosen as an exemplary language arts site by the Central [State] Regional Planning Development Center. Because of these factors, the issue of access was negotiated without diffi-

culty. The choice of this school was an instance of inten-

sity sampling (Patton, 1990) because the phenomenon to be studied-literary understanding-was likely to be in-

tensely manifested at this site.

The classroom teacher and the researcher The classroom teacher, Tracey Bigler-McCarthy, was

in her sixth year of teaching. Her teacher preparation program had emphasized informal education, the active involvement of children in constructing their own mean-

ing, and the use of literature to teach reading. In fact, she had never used a basal reading series as the basis of her

reading program, but had always relied on trade books.

Bigler-McCarthy had focused on children's literature and the importance of talk in learning in her master's program. She maintained her own extensive collection of children's literature, which she used in the classroom.

As the researcher, I added my own background to the social context of the classroom. My teaching experience included (a) 2 years as a teacher in a small one- room school (Grades 1 through 8); (b) 4 years as a member of a collaborative team of four teachers for a

family-grouped informal classroom of kindergarten, first, and second graders; and (c) 13 years as the language arts coordinator for a small school district, where my respon- sibilities included professional development and literacy project work with primary and elementary teachers.


These experiences enabled a uniquely close relationship with the classroom teacher. Because we had in common the experience of teaching first and second graders, and because we shared a remarkably similar philosophy of teaching and learning as well as a knowledge of children's literature, Bigler-McCarthy and I found that the day-to-day negotiation of the research agenda was without significant stresses. Both of us placed a high value on children's free responses during the reading of stories and were less interested in pursuing a set agenda than in listening to what the children had to say. In particular, we both valued the educational research process and felt that we were working collaboratively on a project that we both agreed was important. My role as researcher ranged on the continuum of participation-observation (Spradley, 1980). I functioned principally as an observer during the whole-group read-alouds while Bigler- McCarthy read to the group; my function shifted to active participant when I read to the children.

The children There were 27 students in the class when the study

began; after winter vacation, one student's family moved, leaving 26. Twenty-three were of European American ethnicity; 3 were African American; and 1 had Native American heritage. The opinion of the classroom teacher and the school's staff development officer (based on the children's speech patterns and comments about relatives in Appalachia) was that 8 of the children had Appalachian heritage. There were 18 first graders (11 boys and 7 girls) and 9 second graders (4 boys and 5 girls). All of the students' parents gave informed consent (Eichelberger, 1989) for their children to be involved in the study. Seven children (26% of the class) participated in the school's free (or reduced-price) lunch program. Nine children received remedial assistance in reading in pull-out programs. In this report the names of all the children are pseudonyms.

The classroom context The classroom was physically organized to reflect

the philosophy of active learning and collaboration es- poused by the school and the teacher. The overall im- pression was that of a workshop (Lindfors, 1991), in which the various spaces contained the tools and materi- als the children needed. It was divided by bookshelves and storage shelves into five well-stocked areas: house- keeping (for dramatic play and dress-up); art; mathemat- ics; science; and a meeting area surrounded by shelves of the classroom's collection of some 700 trade books, always supplemented by between 50 and 75 books from the public library or the school's extensive central collection. Children worked in small groups at a variety of ta-

bles throughout the room as well as on the floor and in the hallway immediately outside the classroom.

In this physical setting, the classroom schedule was characterized by the allowance of large blocks of time for integrated thematic work. In the morning, children entered the room and chose a book for silent reading. After this, there was a morning meeting when the teacher out- lined what would happen on that school day. A storybook read-aloud almost invariably concluded the morning meeting, and it was at this time that the study's read-aloud data were collected. After the meeting was a time for small-group lessons with some children, while most children chose their activities for work time, the large block of time until noon. Children wrote stories or made journal entries, did research related to the theme being studied, published books, worked on plays or other presentations for the class, and engaged in other theme-related activities, often in pairs or small groups.

Literacy and literature permeated the school day; like Hickman (1981), I found that the children responded to literature in a great many ways: through art, drama, creative play, music, and in the everyday conversations of the classroom. Much of the children's writing and art was modeled on books they had heard or read, and their spontaneous and planned dramas were also often rooted in literature. During work time, the teacher circulated and had conferences with individuals and small groups. After clean-up and lunch, there was an afternoon meeting with a second storybook read-aloud and the sharing of writing or project work by the children, followed by another block of work time and special subjects: music, art, and physical education.

Over the course of the year, Bigler-McCarthy read approximately 300 books to the children. Storybook read- aloud time was characterized by clear routines. The teacher had chosen the book ahead of time, taking into consideration the children's opinions and requests. The children were seated on the carpet in the meeting area, while the teacher sat in a low chair and held the book to one side, making sure the children could see the illustrations. No child was more than a dozen feet from the book. The teacher usually began with reading the title and the name of the author (and illustrator) on the front cover. Comments about artistic media used in the production of the book were expected and encouraged by the teacher as well as talk about other books produced by the same author or illustrator. No part of the book was left out; the endpages, title page, and dedication page received attention.

The teacher took on the voices of various characters and emphasized any sound effect in the story. She encouraged children to talk at any point during the story, maintaining an attitude of acceptance rather than direc-


tion or evaluation. She was willing to pursue conversational tangents with the children, particularly if the children were making connections between the story and their own lives. Occasionally, the conversation went on so long that the story line was in danger of being lost; at this juncture, it was usually one of the children who said, "Can we get on with the story now?" At the end of the story, she always invited comments, questions, and responses. Children usually asked, "Can I see the book?" and found the particular page they wanted to comment upon. The close proximity of the classroom library facili- tated children's links to other books.

Data collection Observationalfield notes. Notes of various types

(approximately 400 pages) were kept throughout the study. I observed and noted the day-to-day dynamics of the classroom, paying particular attention to the literacy activities in which the children were engaged and the teacher's interactions with the children. I made self- reflective notes on my procedures, the progress of the study, and my developing relationships with the teacher and the children (Richardson, 1994). The notes also contained summaries of my informal conversations with the teacher and a record of our member checks (Guba & Lincoln, 1989), and notes relating to the methodology I was constructing through the recording of hypotheses, questions, and speculations (Glesne & Peshkin, 1992).

Storybook read-alouds. All the chosen stories were picture storybooks, defined as books in which illustrations constitute an integral part of a story narrative (Stewig, 1995). The classroom teacher and I collaborated on both the selection of the literary genres and the specific titles represented in the read-alouds, on the basis of her planned thematic units. Three genres were used: (a) fairy and folk tales (e.g., several versions of "Red Riding Hood"; (b) contemporary realistic fiction, such as Fly Away Home (Bunting, 1991); and (c) contemporary fan- tasies like Piggybook (Browne, 1986).

The children's verbal responses were gathered in three contexts: (a) large-group read-alouds of picture storybooks done by the teacher with the whole class, (b) small-group read-alouds done by the researcher with two selected groups of 5 children each, and (c) one-to- one read-alouds done by the researcher with each of the 10 children in the two small groups. The site of large- group read-alouds was the classroom's meeting area, surrounded by shelves containing the classroom library. The site of the small-group and individual read-alouds (which occurred almost invariably when the teacher was reading to the rest of the class in the meeting area) was a half-circle table in the hallway immediately outside the classroom. Children were accustomed to working in the

hallway as an extension of the classroom, so neither this site nor the activity were out of character with the normal flow of classroom experiences.

There were several reasons for the choice of these three contexts. First, the goal was to gather more data from a small group of children that would supplement the data gathered during read-alouds to the whole group. However, the goal was not merely additional data; the small-group read-alouds enabled a form of "relational and variational sampling" (Strauss & Corbin, 1990, p. 185). According to Strauss and Corbin, once the data are scrutinized for individual qualities or characteristics, the researcher tries to group these individual qualities or characteristics in relational categories. Relational and variational sampling thus "focuses on uncovering and validat- ing those relationships" discovered during initial coding (p. 185). In other words, it was hoped that small groups would enable the tracing and tracking of the conceptual relationships in the children's talk because the smaller number of participants would lessen the number of conversational trajectories, thus making the relationships stand out more clearly. The second goal of the small- group and one-to-one read-alouds was to enable children who might not speak so readily in a large group to express themselves, so that their responses could also inform the construction of a view of literary understanding. The third goal was to gather data in three nested social contexts, to ensure that the ultimate description of these children's literary understanding was as complete and rich as possible.

In this classroom, the children were used to working in small groups and individually on many projects; this was consistent with the classroom teacher's philosophy of informal education. She had, in fact, experimented the previous year with small-group discussions of literature. Therefore, the small-group and one-to-one read- alouds were welcomed by the classroom teacher as consistent with (and enriching of) the social context of the classroom. The small groups were chosen to be representative of the whole class in terms of gender, reading ability, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. As well, the small groups reflected the range of participation in storybook read-alouds that existed in the large group, from very voluble children to children who seldom spoke.

Because transcription is an aspect of data reduction and analysis (Atkinson & Heritage, 1984), I transcribed the audiotapes of the three types of storybook read- alouds myself, interleaving my observational field notes on nonverbal behavior. Following Genishi's (1982) sug- gestion that the level of detail in transcriptions must be related to the level and type of analysis the researcher intends, I devised a transcription system that would


Table 1 Phases of the study and types of data collected

November December January February March April May

Phase I Phase II Phase III

observe in classroom observe in classroom

observe read-alouds observe read-alouds =====audiotape and observe whole-group read-alouds========

audiotape and conduct small-group read-alouds========

one-to-one read-alouds one-to-one read-alouds

enable me to analyze the conceptual content of the utterances that indicated aspects of literary understanding.

Phases of data collection. The study was organized in a series of three phases, over a period of 7 months. During Phase I (November to mid-December), the goals were to develop a working relationship with the teacher and children, to become familiar with the school and classroom culture and routines, and to describe the many ways in which literature was responded to and used. During this phase, I observed for the entire school day, 4 or 5 days a week, with an increasing focus on the observation of the teacher's storybook read-alouds. In Phase II (mid-December to mid-April), whole-group storybook read-alouds were observed and audiotaped once or twice every week; four small-group read-aloud sessions were conducted every week (two per group); and two sets of 10 one-to-one read-alouds were conducted. During Phase III (the latter half of April and May), observations of whole-group read-alouds continued, although read- alouds were not audiotaped, and there was a return to general observation in the classroom in order to recon- textualize the read-aloud situation. These phases are summarized in Table 1.

Data analysis Data were analyzed according to the threefold

process of open coding, axial coding, and selective coding described by Strauss and Corbin (1990). Analysis began with the first piece of data and continued in a recursive and iterative manner throughout the study (Patton, 1990), by the constant comparative method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Lincoln & Guba, 1985) of assign- ing codes and categories and modifying them as the analysis and data collection proceeded (Bogdan & Biklen, 1992). The unit of analysis was the conversational turn, defined as "everything said by one speaker before another began to speak" (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975, p. 231).

During open coding, tentative descriptive codes were assigned, with the constant alternation between

part-to-whole reasoning and whole-to-part reasoning that is usually termed analytic induction (Erikson, 1986), suggesting the constant interplay between proposing hypotheses and checking them against the data. As Strauss and Corbin (1990) observed, a great number of these initial codes were developed. During axial coding, this un- wieldy number of codes was organized in larger conceptual categories by "making connections between a category and its sub-categories" (p. 97), and 45 representative transcripts (of 9 whole-group read-alouds, 16 small- group read-alouds, and all 20 one-to-one read-alouds) were chosen for in-depth analysis. The rationale for the choice of these transcripts included (a) representing data from the beginning, middle, and end of the study; (b) including data from each of the large-group, small-group, and one-to-one contexts; and (c) representing the three genres in the study. All 20 of the one-to-one transcripts were chosen because of their brevity in comparison with the large- and small-group transcripts. As a group, these 45 transcripts represented 4,165 conversational turns by the children. The result of axial coding was the development of five broad categories that were descriptive of the children's responses and literary understanding.

At this point, with a manageable number of broad conceptual categories, what Strauss and Corbin (1990) referred to as selective coding could begin: The broad conceptual categories were related to each other in order to perceive patterns and relationships as well as to define the core category of the study, that of literary understanding. It was during selective coding that the conceptual categories for the children's responses were related by making another analytical pass through the data in order to describe the literary stances and actions taken by the children and the various functions assumed by the texts they were discussing. As well, the five conceptual categories were further analyzed as the enactments of three basic literary impulses. These final results of selective coding constituted the grounded theory of literary understanding that is presented in a separate section below.


Table 2 Conceptual categories for children's talk during storybook read-alouds

Category n %

Analytical 3,048 73 Intertextual 402 10 Personal 418 10 Transparent 89 2 Performative 208 5

Issues of credibility and trustworthiness were dealt with according to Guba and Lincoln's (1989) parallel cri- teria, including (a) prolonged and persistent classroom engagement (data from 83 read-alouds over 7 months, (b) peer debriefing with a fellow graduate student, (c) negative case analysis, (d) member checks with the classroom teacher, and (e) triangulation of the various types of collected data. In addition, an interrater reliability check was done independently by the classroom teacher, who coded a random selection of 20% of the data with the final coding categories. Agreement with the researcher's coding was 93%.

Results and discussion: The nature of literary understanding

Five conceptual categories emerged from the analysis of the children's talk, representing five different facets of literary understanding. These are summarized in Table 2.

Category 1: The analytical This category included all responses that seemed to

be dealing with the text as an object for analysis and interpretation. Children stayed within the text (conceived as a union of visual and verbal sign systems) and made comments that reflected an analytical stance. Category 1 was found to have five subcategories.

The book as a culturalproduct produced by authors, illustrators, and publishers. Children discussed the authors and illustrators as the makers of the book, questioning their decisions and choices. The children also discussed the medals or awards the book had won. Talk about pub- lishing information was also included in this subcategory. For example, the discussion of Little Red Riding Hood

(Hyman, 1983) included references to the silver Caldecott Honor Award medallion on the front cover:

Peggy: It got a Caldecott Honor. Unidentified child: Yeah, a silver. Kenny: It's second best. Mickey: What year was it illustrated? Teacher: Where could I find that out? Mickey: In the back, in the copyrighting.

The aspect of literary understanding represented by this subcategory (5% of all the coded data) is the knowledge about how books are made and the people who make them as well as the public recognition that has been ac- corded a book.

Focus on the language of the story. Here the focus was on the visual features of print: questioning the meaning of words and phrases, offering alternative wording, and attempting to prove a point by referring to the specific language of the text. The type of literary understanding represented by this subcategory (4% of all the coded data) is the understanding that the specific language an author chooses is worth close examination, and that the richest understanding of a text is partly dependent on knowing what the language of the text means in some detail, as well as appreciating the specific choices that the author has made. Sometimes the children suggested alternative wording for the story:

Teacher: [reading from the Hyman (1983) version of Little Red Riding Hood] "You'll have to lift the latch and let yourself in, dear," the grandmother called out. "I'm feeling too weak to get out of bed."

Peggy: She could have said, "feeling too nauseous."

Taking an analytical approach to illustrations. Because they were responding to picture books, in which the illustrations and other nontextual matter have equal importance with the verbal text, the children adopted an analytical approach to this important feature of picture books. They discussed the artistic medium or media that may have been used to produce illustrations; described the arrangement of the illustrations or the illustration sequence; speculated on the semiotic significance of various illustration conventions and codes (codes of color, conventions for portraying movement, and the portrayal of the illusion of space through perspective and point of view); compared illustrations with each other; and described the details of illustrations. For the children, an important part of the literary understanding of picture books was their comprehension of the form and content of illustrations, as well as the ways in which the illustrations had been arranged by the designer or illustrators. In almost one quarter of all their conversational turns (23%), the children were doing analytical work with illustrations, and this talk was frequently quite sophisticated. For example, during the discussion of The Whales' Song (Sheldon, 1990), Trudy observed that the illustrations were "dark" and "blue," and the teacher asked why the illustrator might have chosen to use dark colors:

Julie: Because the whales are blue. Teacher: Umm. What else? Kenny: 'Cause it's really slow, and it's dark illustrations.


Mickey: Because it's a relaxed book, and it's slow, like the ocean.

Kenny: The, um, the darker the color is, the slower the words are.

In this vignette, the children were reaching toward the understanding that the color blue often conveys a calm

feeling; they were, in fact, learning visual semiosis and using it to interpret the general tone of the story.

The children also analyzed the peritextual features of picture books. In fact, 8% of the coded data represented discussion about the front and back cover, endpages, title page, and other components outside the narrative of the story. An example of the richness of this discussion is the children's analysis of the illustration on the title page of Christopher Coady's (1991) version of Red Riding Hood, which ends brutally with the death of Red Riding Hood. In this version, neither the little girl nor her grandmother are saved by an alert woodsman. Coady's illustrations are thus appropriately dark and menacing. The title page of this book contains an oval illustration of a bare tree, with a full moon behind it. The tree branches and the lower border of the illustration are tinged with red. The following is a portion of the discussion about this page:

Sean: At first, there's some red strokes over the moon [pointing to the title page vignette].

Nicole: Because it's Red Riding Hood. Mickey: Because when, um, the hunter cuts him open,

there's blood in the story. Julie: It is October because the leaves are not on

the tree. Teacher: And look at that moon: a full moon. Charles: It's a warning of blood from the wolf that's

going to eat the grandma.

Constructing interpretations of narrative meaning. About 40% of the conversational turns were concerned with this process. Part of the reason for this large invest- ment may be that two thirds of the discussion took place during the reading of the story, when the children were naturally concerned to follow the story line as it unfold- ed. (About one third of the turns took place after the reading of the story.) The children described, evaluated, speculated, or made inferences about the story characters' actions, made frequent use of prediction and then confirmed or disconfirmed their predictions, commented about the structure of the story, made thematic or quasi- thematic statements about the story, interpreted events or objects symbolically, and made evaluative comments about the story. They generated long chains of specula- tive hypotheses about some gap in the text, scaffolding each others' reasoning, exploring various possibilities, and eventually arriving at a conclusion.

During the reading of Cinderella (Galdone, 1978), for example, Mickey asked why Cinderella's glass slipper didn't disappear on the stroke of midnight. Why indeed?

Presumably, the slipper was part of all the magically produced clothing and accoutrements that the fairy godmother had warned would disappear at midnight. Why shouldn't the slipper disappear along with everything else? This intriguing question generated many hypotheses. Some children thought it had to do with the size of the slipper; maybe it was too small to be affected by the

magic. Others suggested that the material-glass-had something to do with its permanence. One particularly interesting hypothesis suggested that maybe the fairy godmother's wand ran out of power. Several children built on the idea that the fairy godmother's intention had

something to do with it, eventually arriving at the conclusion that the godmother had planned all along that Cinderella would marry the prince and that therefore the

slipper had to remain in order to provide a means of

identifying her. These hypotheses could be neither confirmed nor disconfirmed by the text, but the speculation was considered meaningful in its own right.

An example of structural analysis is provided by the children's comments about The Napping House (Wood, 1984), a cumulative tale. They noticed that "it gets smaller and smaller" because each of the successive characters in the book is smaller than the one before. They also noticed that each page contains "more and more words." One of the children summarized that "The words go from small to big, and the animals go from big to small."

Discussion of the relationship between fiction and reality. The children were discovering both the differences and similarities between fact and fiction. Fly Away Home (Bunting, 1991) tells the story of a boy and his father who live in an airport because they cannot afford to have an apartment. The boy is the first-person narrator, and the story is not presented as a fantasy, either in the text or the illustrations. Charles, however, had a hard time believing it, and his disbelief sparked a discussion about the relationship of fact and fiction:

Gordon: It is possible. It is possible. Teacher: Do you think there are people who might not

have a house because they might not have enough money?

Charles: I don't think so. They let people that don't got no money, or nothing, they stay in a hotel, for free.

Sally: My grandma, she met a woman who lived in the back of, of a gas station. And she gave that woman some money for something to eat.

Charles: If it was by the author and the um, illustrator, it wouldn't be right there, it would be just by who- ever wrote the book, like right there, there


would be no illustrator [pointing to the front cover, and the names of the author and illustrator].

Gordon: It could be by, it could be real, because they could've told the author about their adventure, or something, and then the author wrote about it, and written the story down, and then, it could be possible, Charles.

Terry: They told the story, and the author knew, and then he wrote it down, and the illustrator, he probably knew, then he drew the pictures. What he thought it would be like.

In one sense, of course, Charles is right; the story isn't real, though it presents the truth. The author and the illustrator, though they tell the story, did not actually experience it. Gordon and Terry speculate on how the book was actually written and produced; perhaps the homeless people who actually had the "adventure" told their story to the author, and the author wrote it down. Then the illustrator studied the story and drew the pictures, not the way it actually was, but the way "he thought it would be like." The children were groping toward the realization that realistic fiction is both real and fictional. The responses in this subcategory represented about 1% of all the coded data.

Category 2: The intertextual This category reflected the children's abilities to re-

late the text being read aloud to other cultural texts and products such as other books, the work of other artists and illustrators, movies, videos, advertisements, TV programs, or the writing or art of classmates. In this category, the text seemed to be viewed in relation to other texts, serving as an element in the matrix of interrelated cultural contexts. This category represented approximately 10% of the children's conversational turns in the coded data. Three levels of intertextual connections were identified. The first level of connections, associative links, was characterized by an unelaborated statement of likeness between the text being read aloud and another cultural product. The second level, analytical links, was characterized by a statement of likeness followed by an expla- nation of why the two texts were alike or different. The third level of connections, synthesizing links, was characterized by using multiple intertextual links to make generalizations and draw conclusions about sets of stories.

The children used these intertextual links in several ways. Just a few pages into a Native American version of "Cinderella," The Rough-Face Girl (Martin, 1992), Mickey used his knowledge of the traditional Cinderella story to predict the end of the story: "The Rough-Face Girl is going to marry the Invisible Being. I think it's going to turn out like 'Cinderella.'" The children also interpreted story characters' feelings, motivations, or actions. During a

read-aloud of Amazing Grace (Hoffman, 1991), for example, Trudy used her intertextual knowledge to understand Grace's motivation to be Peter Pan in the school play. Trudy commented, "There is a girl who plays Peter Pan, 'cause I got a tape of it, I got both tapes." Trudy's reasoning was that it is in the realm of possibility that a female could play the role of Peter because there are other texts in which this happens.

The children interpreted symbolic elements in the text through intertextual connections. In Fly Away Home (Bunting, 1991), a homeless boy and his father notice a bird that has been trapped. After many attempts, the bird manages to fly out through an opened door. Trudy used an intertextual connection to a television program to interpret the bird as a symbol for the boy's mother: "The bird could be watching over the boy; maybe it's his [dead] mother, turned into a bird.... I knew it might be his mother because on Married With Children, Bud turns into another dog. 'Cause he has been bad."

The children also used intertextual connections to create and modify schemata for stories. Part of the schema for many folk tales and fairy tales includes the idea of characters changing shape from humans to animals. In trying to understand the changing shape of the Invisible Being in The Rough-Face Girl (Martin, 1992), for example, the children alluded to three other texts in which a metamorphosis occurs: Disney's The Lion King (Ingoglia, 1994), The Frog Prince (Tarcov, 1993), and The Swan Princess (Hughes, 1994). Another part of the schema for traditional tales is the idea of good triumph- ing over evil. The children were able to reach this generalization independently and then to critique it by discussing books that do not conform to the general pattern, such as Coady's (1991) version of Red Riding Hood. As cognitive flexibility theory (Spiro et al., 1994) has suggested, children's knowledge was built up across cases to reach these generalizations.

Category 3: The personal This category (10% of the children's conversational

turns) included responses indicating that the children were connecting the text to their own personal lives. There were two directions to these responses: from their lives to the text, and from the text to their own lives "(Cochran-Smith, 1984). A life-to-text connection was one in which the children used some experience from their own lives to understand or illuminate the text being read aloud. A text-to-life connection was one in which the children used the text in order to understand or illuminate something in their own lives. Other types of personalizing responses were also identified. Children gave themselves agency in stories, telling what they would do if they were a certain character, or questioning the story


from their own personal viewpoints: "I would have done X" or "that's not what I would do." There were indica- tions that the children considered characters to be pro- tean creations whom the children could personally control. During the read-aloud of The Three Bears (Galdone, 1985), for example, there was a discussion about Goldilocks's age, given the fact that the illustrator had depicted her with missing front teeth. The teacher asked, "How old are children who are losing their teeth?"

Sean: Twenty-nine? Trudy: Real tiny babies? Teacher: But there are children in here [the classroom]

who have missing teeth. Do you think Goldilocks could be your age?

Gordon: Let's make her our age!

Category 4: The transparent This category included responses suggesting that

the children were intensely participating in the narrative world of the story. The world of the text, for the moment, seemed to be identical with and transparent to the children's world. Verbal responses in this category were rare, providing only tantalizing glimpses of what was possibly happening as the children had a lived-through experience of the story (Rosenblatt, 1978) or entered the secondary world of the story (Benton, 1992).

Talking back to the text in an immediate and spontaneous manner was taken to be an indication of this interior experience. In Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters (Steptoe, 1987), for example, one of the characters de- clares vehemently, "I will be queen. I will be queen." Immediately after the teacher read this, several children said quietly, "No, she won't." The spontaneous immediacy of the responses, coupled with the low tone of voice in which they were spoken, seemed to indicate an engagement in the world of the story.

The type of literary understanding represented by these types of responses is the experience of being lost in a book (Nell, 1988), as one surrenders to the power of the text (Scholes, 1985). It is possible that, during storybook read-alouds, the best indication of such an experience is not verbal response, but silence. This may be the reason why this category represented only 2% of the children's conversational turns in the coded data.

Category 5: The performative This category included responses that indicated the

children were entering the world of the text in order to manipulate or steer it toward their own creative purposes. In Category 4, the children were, so to speak, manipulated by the text; in Category 5, responses suggested that the text was being manipulated by the children. The

text seemed to function as a platform or "pretext" (O'Neill, 1995, p. 136) for the children's own creativity or imagination; or the text became a playground for a carnivalesque romp (Bakhtin, 1984). The children took some situation or event in the book and used it as the basis for a flight of their own imagination, a type of playful perfor- mance or "signifyin(g)" (Gates, 1988, p. 44) on the text. The type of literary understanding represented by such responses may be understood as that which flows from a literary stance described by postmodern and deconstructive critics for whom the text is a collection of signifiers with infinite possibilities for meaning making and no fixed or stable referent. Because the responses in this category resisted attempts at univocal meaning and diverged from the story line, they might have been considered subversive or simply off task in a less tolerant classroom.

The children's discussion of Goldilocks's missing teeth during the read-aloud of Galdone's (1985) version of The Three Bears has already been mentioned. Pointing to Galdone's illustration of the broadly smiling Goldilocks, Joey blurted out, "Maybe right here she got punched in the face! Maybe Kenny punched her!" The class was de- lighted by this response, and a moment of chaos ensued as several children (mostly boys) began to throw fake punches at each other. In this case, Joey deliberately (and cleverly) played with the fiction-reality distinction in a subversive way. His response was performative because he used the story as a platform for his own creative expression. Another example of performative response was the children's exuberant reaction to Amazing Grace (Hoffman, 1991), the story of an African American child who wants to be Peter Pan in her school play. After being taken to the ballet, she practices the dance she will do as Peter Pan in a green costume. At this point, Gordon began a series of performative responses:

Gordon: You're Peter Pan [to the teacher] because you're wearing green! I'm Peter Blue! [he is wearing a blue shirt]

Julie: I'm Peter White! [she is wearing white] Terry: [gets up and starts turning around, doing ballet

movements] Julie: Terry, sit down! [laughing] Sally: [gets up, also, and turns around] I'm just stretch-

ing! [looking at the teacher mischievously] Teacher: OK, wait! [laughing]

[Sally, Julie, Gordon, and Terry all get up and start twirling around]

Teacher: This story is causing people to want to get up and fly, I can tell! This story is a moving story, isn't it?

This vignette-an example of what I call a carnivalesque romp--demonstrates how exhilarating performative responses could become for the children. There is a


Table 3 Five aspects of literary understanding interrelated by Stance, Action, and Function

Stance Action Function Aspects of literary How children situate What children do How texts function understanding themselves in relation to texts with texts

Analytical (a) Within texts, children analyze, using texts as objects.

Dealing with the text as an object or cultural product. Children stay within the text and make comments that reflect an analytical stance.

Intertextual (b) Across texts, children link or relate, using texts as context.

Relating the text being read to other cultural products. The text is understood in the context of other texts, functioning as an element in a matrix of interrelated texts.

Personal (c) To or from texts, children personalize, using texts as stimuli.

Connecting the text to one's own life, moving either from the life to the text or from the text to one's life. The text acts as a stimulus for a personal connection.

Transparent (d) Through texts, children merge with texts, using texts as their identity.

Entering the world of the story and becoming one with it. The story world becomes (momentarily) identical with and transparent to the children's world.

Performative (e) On texts, children perform or signify, using texts as platforms.

Entering the text world and manipulating it for one's own purposes. The text functions as a platform for children's creativity, becoming a playground for a carnivalesque romp.

sense in which these responses interrupted or disrupted the serious meaning making that was the principal activity in which the children were engaged. However, another way of looking at these responses is to conceptualize them as expressively aesthetic acts on a high level. They represent a type of (deconstructive) literary understanding that sees the text as "a vessel of associations helpless- ly open to the mastery of [our] response" (Grudin, 1992, p. 105). This category represented approximately 5% of the children's conversational turns in the coded data.

A grounded theory of the literary understanding of young children

In this section, I lay out the grounded theory of young children's literary understanding that arose from the conceptual categories described above. Table 3 presents a visual summary of the five aspects or facets of the literary understanding displayed by the young children in this study and is based directly on the conceptual categories of their responses.

The three headings at the top of chart (Stance, Action, and Function) indicate that each of the five facets of literary understanding, listed on the left side, may be viewed as Stances assumed by the children, or as Actions performed by the children, or in terms of the various Functions served by texts. The chart may therefore be viewed vertically, comparing and contrasting the five

facets of literary understanding with one another, through a consideration of each of the three columns.

Stance refers to how children situate themselves in relation to the text. In the first aspect of literary understanding (a), children situate themselves within the text, in order to engage in interpretation through a close reading. In the second aspect of literary understanding (b), children situate themselves across two or more texts, for the purpose of making interpretive intertextual links. In the third aspect of literary understanding (c), children are drawn to texts when they relate their own lives to the text, and they draw from texts when they relate the text to their own lives. In the fourth aspect of literary understanding (d), children situate themselves psychologically so that, for the moment, they live their lives through the story as it is being read. In the fifth aspect of literary understanding (e), children situate themselves on the text, as if the text were a platform, in order to express themselves creatively.

Action refers to what children do with texts. They may (a) analyze a text from within, discussing and interpreting its structure, its characters, its plot, or setting. They may also discuss the form and content of the illustrations, as well as the media used in producing them. Children may also relate the illustrations to the verbal text, interpret various illustration conventions and codes, predict what may happen, or apply particular items of


literary knowledge such as foreshadowing. Another way in which children may interpret is to (b) link or relate several texts to one another. If enough texts are linked together, this may result in the ability to understand high- level generalizations about groups of texts. Children may also (c) personalize texts, making them their own by relating them to their own lives, by using texts to understand or cope with some personal issue, by being challenged to alter their view of reality through their experience of the text, by seeing themselves as tellers of the same tale, or by telling what they would do if they were a storybook character. Children may also (d) merge with texts, becoming momentarily one with the story, so that their "third area" (Winnicott, 1971, p. 102), the "potential space" (p. 107) of play and imagination, integrates receptively with the story to the extent that the story world and their third area are united. As well, children may (e) perform or signify (Gates, 1988) on texts, using texts as cata- lysts for their own flights of creative fancy.

Function refers to the various ways in which texts may be used. Texts may function as (a) discrete objects for children's analytic energies. Texts may also function as (b) elements in the larger context created by the connections among several texts. Another way that texts function is as (c) stimuli for personal self-knowledge, growth, or empathy. When (d) a child merges with a text intimately, the text and the child's third area become transparent to each other. In this way, a text may function as the momentary identity of the child. Finally, a text may function as (e) a platform or playground for the child's expressive performative response.

Read horizontally, the chart summarizes each facet of literary understanding in one sentence:

(a) Within texts, children analyze, using texts as objects.

(b) across texts, children link or relate, using texts as context.

(c) From or to texts, children personalize, using texts as stimuli.

(d) Through texts, children merge with texts, using texts as their identity.

(e) On texts, children perform or signify, using texts as platforms.

Although the chart expresses the relationships among the various types of literary understanding by providing ways of comparing and contrasting them, there is, nevertheless, a static quality to this representation that does not accord well with the dynamic and fluid nature of children's responses. The facets or aspects of literary understanding are not rigidly distinct categories, hermeti- cally sealed off from one another, but rather synergistically interact. An example from the data will make this interaction clear.

Piggybook (Browne, 1986) is a contemporary fantasy that tells the story of a family named Piggott, in which Mrs. Piggott does all the work while her husband and two sons do nothing but order her around. During the read-aloud of this story, Charles responded to the portion of the text that describes Mrs. Piggott's labors:

Teacher: [reading the text] As soon as they had eaten, Mrs. Piggott washed the dishes, washed the clothes, did the ironing, and then cooked some more.

Charles: Cinderella, Cinderella! Get your butt down here!

In this response, Charles was clearly making a connection to another text or cluster of texts: the many variants of the Cinderella story that he had heard. As well, Charles was also using the story as a platform for a playful per- formance; he was manipulating the story so as to insert this humorous statement as he signified on the text. Thus, at least two facets of literary understanding (the intertextual and performative) were present in the response.

The other three facets of literary understanding seem to be present as well. Charles's comment is evidence of interpretive close reading-quite incisively so, for it reveals, implicitly, his analytical understanding of the relationships among the story characters, an understanding of such acuity that he is able to express these relationships in one pithy remark. Mr. Piggott and the two sons are indeed very much like the stepmother and stepsisters in "Cinderella," as Mrs. Piggott is like Cinderella. As well, we know that it is highly unlikely that Charles has heard a variant of "Cinderella" in which the stepsisters call to Cinderella with the words used by Charles. It seems that Charles is personalizing by using his own distinct voice; perhaps he is even remembering occasions when he was spoken to (or spoke) in this way.

Finally, the immediacy with which Charles speaks and the incisive quality of his comment argue a participation in the world of the story and a momentary merging with the text (just prior to his comment) that is character- istic of the fourth aspect of literary understanding, the transparent. Thus, all five aspects of literary understanding may be present at this moment, though some may be more immediately evident than others. From the theoretical standpoint of the chart, Charles may be assuming multiple stances and performing multiple actions, and the text may have multiple functions for him as he makes this response.

Three basic literary impulses. In this section, the interaction of the five facets of literary understanding, described above, is used to further elucidate the connections among the five aspects. Consider the relationship between the first and second aspects of literary understanding, the analytical and the intertextual. Both intertextual connec-


Table 4 Three basic literary impulses and their enactments

Analytical response

Hermeneutic impulse enacted through Intertextual response

Personalizing impulse enacted through Personal response (text-life and life-text)

Transparent response

Aesthetic impulse enacted through Transparent response Performative response

tions and within-text analysis seemed to have a primarily interpretive intent. Whether the children stayed within the text or related it to other texts, the principal focus of their talk was to understand the story. Interpretation can focus within the text itself, as children attempt to understand the text's form and content, or it can also focus on the context, the world of texts outside the focal text. In this case, interpretation is a matter of forging links between the text at hand and the world of texts outside. These two facets of literary understanding might therefore be conceptualized as the two enactments of a single impulse, which I name the hermeneutic impulse. the basic impulse to interpret the meaning of the text.

Next, consider the relationship between the fourth and fifth aspects of literary understanding, the transparent and the performative. The transparent aspect is receptive in nature, whereas the performative aspect is expressive in nature; however, both aspects are manifestations of an aesthetic orientation. In its receptive form, this orientation results in the lived-through experience of a work of literature, as we aesthetically surrender, for the moment, to the power of the text. Assuming the aesthetic orientation, however, may also result in performative expression, as the reader (or listener) uses the experience of the text as a platform or launching pad for his or her own creative action. The power of the text, rather than being something to which the reader surrenders, becomes instead the catalyst for creative expression. These two facets of literary understanding might therefore be conceptualized as the two enactments of a single impulse, which I name the aesthetic impulse.

The tendency to want to personalize a story (which is enacted by the third aspect of literary understanding in making life-to-text or text-to-life connections) constitutes a third basic impulse. To want to draw the story to oneself in some way and to use the story to inform (or even transform) one's own life, this urge I name the personalizing impulse. This impulse is the impulse to forge links among the concepts, assumptions, narrative trajectory, and thematic meanings evoked or invited by the text and the reader's

(or listener's) own world. On the one hand, we bring our own life experiences to bear on a text. These are life-to- text connections. On the other hand, the evoked concepts and meanings are another form of experience (a virtual experience in Langer's [19531 terminology), and may thus be heuristic in informing or transforming our lives. The personalizing impulse therefore travels in two directions; the reader thinks, "I am like the text. The text is like me. Thus, it can inform or transform me."

Table 4 summarizes the connections between the three basic literary impulses and the five types of response identified as the conceptual categories in this study. Having constructed these three basic literary impulses from the five conceptual categories of literary understanding that arose from the analysis of the data, I now describe these impulses more fully and relate them to other theories.

At the core of the hermeneutic impulse is the desire to master the text, either by interpreting it or contextualiz- ing it. Story grammars (Graesser et al., 1991) and schema theory (Anderson & Pearson, 1984) describe interpretation as the taking in of information and organizing it into pre- existing cognitive structures, which are in turn modified, extended, and refined by this new information. The New Critics' concern with close reading also relates to the analytical (within-text) enactment of this impulse. The interest of archetypal criticism (Frye, 1957) in the ways texts dis- play common patterns or express common universal themes relates to the intertextual enactment of this im-

pulse. Other theoretical perspectives that concern themselves with context in various ways are the so-called New Historicism (Veeser, 1989) and Marxist literary theory (Eagleton, 1976), which place texts in the interpretive context of historical, sociocultural, and economically driven hegemonies. All of these theories have to do with master- ing the text in one way or another.

At the core of the aesthetic impulse is the desire to forget our own contingency and experience the freedom that art provides. White (1994) wrote, "Art educates us in freedom since it alone shows the human spirit untram-


meled by compromising circumstance; art alone is pure play" (pp. 330-331). Sontag's (1961) notable comment that "In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art" (p. 14) expressed the emphasis of the aesthetic impulse. She made the point that it is the pleasurable experience of literature (and of all art) that is important, rather than the interpretation of it. Benton's (1992) concept of the secondary world and theories of literary pleasure (Barthes, 1976) focus on the dynamics of the receptive enactment of the aesthetic impulse. Bakhtin's (1984) concept of the carnivalesque and Gates's (1988) concept of signifying concern themselves with the expressive enactment of the aesthetic impulse.

At the core of the personalizing impulse is the desire to link or connect ourselves to texts, to draw them to ourselves, and to understand their relevance for our lives. This personalization is what gives literature its power to defamiliarize life, making it new and strange, giving us fresh insights into daily experience (Schklovsky, 1966). Some reader-response theories (Bleich, 1978; Holland, 1975) are most centrally focused on the dynamics of the personalizing impulse, the meaning the text possesses for each reader. Theorists and researchers who write of the life-transforming power of literature (Booth, 1988; McGinley et al., 1997) or the ways in which literature can change our view of reality and impel us to social justice (Willis, 1997) as well as those concerned with our abilities to resist or read against the text (Encisco, 1994) are also centrally concerned with the personalizing impulse.

Several theories seem to be equally concerned with all three impulses. Rosenblatt's transactive theory (1978) has a reader-based component and is thus deeply concerned with the personalizing impulse; literary meaning is, first of all, personal meaning. The aesthetic and hermeneutic impulses in the theory presented here bear some similarities to her aesthetic and efferent stances, re- spectively. However, there are some differences. Rosenblatt's aesthetic stance seems to partake equally of the receptive enactment of my concept of the aesthetic impulse and the personalizing impulse. For Rosenblatt (1964), the lived-through experience of a work of literature (or any work of art) is private, interior, and personal; to use her terminology, the poem is constructed inside the reader's psyche. Rosenblatt did not focus on the expressive enactment of the aesthetic impulse, which results in the public expression of the reader's creativity. Rosenblatt's efferent stance corresponds in a similar way to my idea of the hermeneutic impulse. One expression of the efferent stance is to read in order to take something away from the text, as when we read a recipe in order to cook. Another expression of the efferent stance is literary analysis. The first of these expressions of the efferent stance-reading in order to take something away

or learn facts-is not a part of my concept of the hermeneutic impulse, because the hermeneutic impulse is a literary impulse and such a purpose is not a literary purpose at all. The second of these expressions of the efferent stance-literary analysis-is a part of my idea of the hermeneutic impulse. However, the hermeneutic impulse may also be enacted by connecting the text to the wider world of cultural products and contexts. Rosenblatt also asserted that the reader's experience is always socially contextualized.

Langer's (1995) model of envisionment describes four stances readers may take relative to texts. Being out and stepping in, involving the reader's mobilization of prior life experiences in order to understand a text, would seem to combine the personalizing and hermeneutic impulses. Being in and moving through, referring to the reader's immersion in the text, is similar to the receptive enactment of the aesthetic impulse. Being in and stepping out, concerned with comparing the lives of characters in the story with one's own life, may be similar to the personalizing impulse. Stepping out and objectifying experience may be most closely related to the hermeneutic impulse. The grounded theory I am pre- senting extends and builds on Langer's theory by specify- ing the ways in which readers may step into, move through, and step out of texts. It also clarifies the various stances and actions readers take, as well as the various ways in which texts function for readers.

The formal theoretical definition of literary understanding that is implied by this discussion may be stated as follows:

The literary understanding of young children consists of five facets: the analytical, the intertextual, the personal, the transparent, and the performative, which are each characterized by different stances, actions, and functions. These five facets constitute the enactments of three basic literary impulses: the hermeneutic impulse, the personalizing impulse, and the aesthetic impulse. Literary understanding is the dynamic process whereby these three impulses are ac- tivated and synergistically interact with each other.

Pedagogical implications This study has several implications for classroom

practice, particularly for the common practice of reading storybooks to children. In this study, the storybook read- aloud situation was one of the most important sites for the formation of a literary interpretive community (Fish, 1980) in the classroom. Teachers may want to reflect on how their own storybook read-aloud practices, rules, and routines assist in the formation of a classroom interpretive community. One aspect of the way read-alouds were han- dled in this study deserves special mention. Two thirds of


the children's conversational turns in this study occurred during the reading of the story, whereas one third of the turns occurred after the reading. Teachers may feel that they want children to listen carefully to the story and experience it aesthetically, saving talk for after the reading so that the story is experienced as a unified whole. This practice certainly has merit; however, if used exclusively as the sole model for storybook read-alouds, it may result in far less discussion and a lower level of literary understanding for the children. Because the children's responses in this study were so often of the moment and in the moment, to hold the response to the end of the reading would have been, in many cases, to lose it.

The data suggest that there were five types of responses made by children, representing five different aspects of their literary understanding. There seems to be a range of types of literary understanding, and teachers can consider how they may increase their students' reper- toires to include a greater portion of this spectrum. Are the children engaged in the analysis of the story by asking questions and debating possible answers, by interpreting story characters' feelings and motivations through the verbal text and illustrations, by disagreeing with or challenging the text, or by exploring overarching structural or thematic elements of the story? Are they using a wide variety of other texts (including other books, the texts of popular culture, and the texts produced by their classmates) to interpret the text being discussed? Are they personalizing the story by making text-to-life and life-to- text connections, by giving themselves agency in the story, or by using the story as a catalyst for the discussion of social and cultural issues relevant to their own lives? Are they showing evidence of surrendering to the power of the text by entering its secondary world? Are they being allowed to use the story or parts of the story as the jump- ing-off site for their idiosyncratically creative or subversive responses?

As well, the analysis suggested that the five different aspects of literary understanding were the enactments of three basic literary impulses: (a) the hermeneutic impulse, concerned with interpreting and understanding the story; (b) the personalizing impulse, concerned with drawing the story to one's self; and (c) the aesthetic impulse, concerned with having a lived-through experience of the story or using it for the expression of the children's own creativity. In considering literary extension activities, teachers may want to choose those that have the potential for stimulating all three impulses, so as to develop the children's literary understanding in a comprehensive way.

Picture books provide much visual stimulation. Children should be encouraged to explore this potential by discussing the possibilities of semiotic significance in the dust jacket, front and back covers, endpages, title and

half-title pages, and dedication page. In picture books, the illustrations act to fill in gaps in the text, and the text acts to fill in gaps in the illustrations. In order to understand this special affordance of picture books, teachers may need to refine and extend their own understanding of art, illustration, and picture book theory. By according illustrations equal importance with the text, teachers can encourage this richer interpretation, thus facilitating the ability to integrate visual and verbal information.

In this study, intertextual connections were found to be helpful in enabling the children to make a variety of interpretive moves. Teachers can encourage children to make these connections by asking, "What other stories does this story remind you of?"

Limitations of the study and implications for further research

This study focused exclusively on children's talk in order to describe their literary understanding. A truly comprehensive description would also include their responses in the form of dramatic play, art, music, and writing. Another limitation of the study is that it concerns classroom discussion of only three literary genres; children's understanding of other genres (e.g., poetry, historical fiction, or informational books) may possess quite different dynamics. Finally, the study reports on the experience of the children in only one classroom. As such, it enables readers to exercise the "epistemology of the particular" (Stake, 1994, p. 240) to determine what generaliz- ability it has for other children in other classrooms.

The findings of this study have several implications for further research. The major theoretical construct of this study, that of literary understanding, is a part of literacy learning in general. Research that makes clear the connections between literary understanding and the broader cognitive processes involved in learning to read and write and that places the literary understanding of young children in the wider context of literacy learning is therefore needed.

The connection between literature and children's writing seems to be very powerful (DeFord, 1984). As we expand our view of what constitutes literary understanding beyond the traditional elements of narrative, this broader view may reveal more connections between literary understanding and writing ability. For example, what impact would children's aptitude for performative response have on their ability to write forcefully and with strong rhetorical purpose? How might the development of the personalizing impulse assist children in generating written text that embodies their voices?

Although the storybook read-aloud situation has been the object of more research than any other early literacy event, the literary understanding that children de-


velop during the storybook read-aloud situation deserves more complete investigation. For example, we have some convincing evidence not only that storybook reading style varies across teachers (Dickinson & Keebler, 1989; Martinez & Teale, 1993) but also that some reading styles have a more powerful impact than others on later literacy ability (Dickinson & Smith, 1994). What impact do varia- tions in storybook reading style have on the development of literary understanding?

The conceptual categories of children's responses in this study and the grounded theory that arose from them need to be tested across many cases in order to validate, extend, and refine them. Do the five facets of literary understanding and the hermeneutic, personalizing, and aesthetic impulses seem to apply to the literary responses of other young children? Do they have application to children in the upper elementary grades or beyond? How would the use of other literary genres affect children's response and understanding?

It is puzzling that the visual aspects of picture books have not been the object of more empirical research, given their potential for meaning making. In this regard, children's learning of illustration codes and conventions deserves more attention from researchers.

Focusing on the common, but potentially rich situation of classroom storybook read-alouds, this study describes what constituted literary understanding for one classroom interpretive community. This literary understanding includes interpretation of the visual aspects of illustration and picture book format. The study suggests that children as young as first and second grade can demonstrate impressive literary critical abilities and that these abilities are appropriately understood through a wide variety of theoretical perspectives. The resulting grounded theory of literary understanding unifies and integrates these perspectives, and as focuses specifically on young children.

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Received December 29, 1997 Revision received October 16, 1998

Accepted December 17, 1998


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