The comprehension of literature places different demands upon children than the comprehension of non-imaginative prose. This is because, in order to comprehend literature, children must enter and understand the highly imaginative worlds of literary creation. Although these worlds are charged with delight for the child, they are at the same time essentially unreal- they are the imaginative productions of their creators

Harker, W. John

English

ScholarWorks at WMU

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and 
Language Arts 
Volume 20 
Issue 3 April 1980 Article 2 
4-1-1980 
Children's Literature and Back to the Basics 
W. John Harker 
University of Victoria 
Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/reading_horizons 
 Part of the Education Commons 
Recommended Citation 
Harker, W. J. (1980). Children's Literature and Back to the Basics. Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy 
and Language Arts, 20 (3). Retrieved from https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/reading_horizons/vol20/iss3/
2 
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by 
the Special Education and Literacy Studies at 
ScholarWorks at WMU. It has been accepted for inclusion 
in Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language 
Arts by an authorized editor of ScholarWorks at WMU. 
For more information, please contact wmu-
scholarworks@wmich.edu. 
CHILDREN'S LITERATURE AND 
BACK TO THE BASICS 
Dr. W. John Harker 
FACUL TY OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA 
The comprehension of literature places different demands upon 
children than the comprehension of non-imaginative prose. This is because, 
in order to comprehend literature, children must enter and understand the 
highly imaginative worlds of literary creation. Although these worlds are 
charged with delight for the child, they are at the same time essentially 
unreal- they are the imaginative productions of their creators. 
Despite these different demands, the current so-called "back to basics" 
movement-entrenched as it has become in a growing number of com-
petency-based reading programs-asserts that it doesn't matter what is 
being read; as long as children are taught to apply a highly structured 
sequence of individual skills, comprehension will result. 
Many teachers intuitively resist the skills approach, however. They feel 
that teaching skills alone does not account for how children learn to read, 
especially when reading involves literature. But teachers need more than 
intuition as a basis for their resistance; they need a well-documented 
rationale. The purpose of this paper is to provide one. Through an ex-
ploration of how children think and learn to comprehend literature, it will 
be shown that many practices which teachers now use successfully, but 
which are at variance with the skills approach, are in fact consistent with 
how children learn to read literature. It is this consistency which accounts 
for the success of these practices in the classroom, which explains their 
intuitive and often long-standing appeal to experienced teachers, and 
which provides the reason why they should continue to be used in the face of 
the encroachment of "the basics" on the teaching of literature. 
Children's Thinking 
A fundamental question in any discussion of reading comprehension is 
how is knowledge attained? Put another way, if comprehension involves 
children in a process of gaining information from the printed page, how is 
this information acquired and organized in the mind? 
While definitive answers to these questions are still to be determined, a 
coherent theory of human cognition and the development of children's 
thinking has been provided by Jerome Bruner and his colleagues. Bruner 
maintains that the individual learns about the world through a process of 
cognitive model building. He theorizes that the individual constructs in his 
mind a representation of the world founded on his experience which serves 
as the basis for interpreting his environment. Fundamental to this process is 
categorization. Bruner defines a category as "a range of discriminably 
160-rh 
different events that are treated 'as if equivalent" (1956, p. 213). For 
example, the category "dog", by which we describe and cognitively 
represent all four-footed creatures which characteristically bark and wag 
their tails, may be made up of dalrnatiam. puudle..,. lockn spa nit·1s and 
so on. However, all dogs, irrespective of shape, size, or color, are 
categorized as equivalent. In this way, categorization involves "an act of 
invention" (Bruner, et aI., 1956, p. 2) by which equivalence is imposed 
upon observably non-equivalent phenomena. All dogs do not look alike 
despite the fact that no one would argue that Fido (a great dane) and Spot 
(a cocker spaniel) are both dogs. For this reason. another way of describing 
a category is to call it "a rule of grouping" (Bruner, et al., 1956, p. 45). 
Categorization demands the active response of the learner to his en-
vironment. The individual selects certain characteristics of the phenomena 
he encounters as "defining attributes" (Bruner et aI., 1956, p. 22) which 
allow him to assign these phenomena to existing categories or to establish 
new categories. Reality is never approached in an empty headed manner; 
the individual brings to each new encounter with the world a set of ex-
pectations about what he will find there. Four-footed creatures that bark 
and wag their tails are likely to be dogs. Moreover, once categorized as dogs. 
a number of other predictions can be made as well-such as these four-
footed creatures can be trained to fetch one's slippers or they are not to be 
trusted around cats. Thus the complexity of the environment is reduced. 
Each new event need not be interpreted ab ova: the individual's cognitive 
model tells him what to expect. 
Developing the efficiency of this cognitive response to the environment is 
the key to children's learning. Through increasing life experience, children 
are a ble to reduce the complexity of their environment by developing more 
inclusive categorizations which permit more accurate prediction. In this 
way, the world becomes more known and knowable; the information load 
created by the constant bombardment of external sensory stimuli becomes 
controlled and ordered. Bruner describes this process of cognitive 
development in children as one of "finding techniques for being simple with 
respect to information" (1963, p. 141). 
Children's Reading 
The influence of cognitive psychology on current explanations of the 
reading process has been both direct and profound. Smith (1978), for 
example, describes reading as a process in which the reader makes 
predictions about the meaning about to unfold as he reads, and com-
prehension as the reader's confirmation of these predictions. Similarly, 
Goodman describes reading as a "psycholinguistic guessing game" in which 
the reader "seeks to reconstruct a message encoded by the writer. He 
concentrates his total prior experience and learning on the task, drawing on 
his experiences and the concepts he has attained as well as the language 
competence he has achieved" (1969, p. 15). 
The common characteristic of these explanations is the importance 
placed on the child's store of knowledge of the world - his model of 
rh-161 
reality - which he brings to the reading act as opposed to the infonnation 
he finds on the page or the particular reading skills he may possess. The 
child does not begin reading as an empty vessel waiting to be filled by the 
infonnation on the page. Rather, he comes to reading with a model of 
reality based on how he has categorized his life experience. I t is on the basis 
of the expectations generated by his model of reality that the child actively 
seeks to make sense of the infonnation before him. Comprehension results 
when the child finds consistency between the model of reality he expects to 
find represented on the page and the reality he in fact encounters there. 
Children's Literature 
But what is the model of reality which the child encounters in literature? 
Hardly the one he has derived from his experience in the real world. 
Suddenly, that benign, four-footed, barking, tail wagging, slipper fetching, 
cat-chasing dog can be transformed into a symbol of ultimate malevolence, 
a Rowsby Woof, diabolical enemy to a struggling colony of socially ordered, 
highly articulate rabbits who inhabit Watershlp Down. The world of 
literature is essentially unreal. The metaphors of reality are upset. Despite 
its apparent or professed reality, the world of literature is a world of 
imagination and fancy created in the mind of the writer. It is a world which 
T. S. Eliot has described as providing "the illusion of a view of life" (1953, 
p. 53). The manner in which this illusion is created has been described by 
Tolkien as a process of "sub creation," where the writer "makes a Secondary 
World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it 
accords with the laws of that world" (1969, p. 114). Similarly, C. S. Lewis 
characterizes the process of literary creation as one of seeing imaginary 
pictures, some of which "have a common flavour, almost a common smell 
which groups them together" (1969, p. 218). When children's literature is 
considered in this way, the child's comprehension task becomes one of 
understanding alternate models of reality created in the minds of writers 
and represented in their work. 
The initial effect of the child's encounter with alternate models of 
reali ty is surprise - surprise resul ting from defeated expecta tion (Berlyn, 
1960; Charlesworth, 1969). What follows surprise is either confusion and 
frustration, or discovery and delight. Bruner has postulated that "the 
triumph of effective surprise is that it takes one beyond common ways of 
experiencing the world" (1973, p. 212). In order to comprehend literature, 
in order to go beyond common ways of experiencing the world, the child 
must restructure, at least momentarily, his model of reality in order to 
accommodate the new reality he encounters in literature. If he fails to do 
this, comprehension will not occur and the child's surprise will not serve as a 
catalyst for the discovery of new, imaginative worlds through literature. 
Teaching Children's Literature 
How can the teacher develop children's comprehension of literature? 
It should be clear by now that children's comprehension will not be 
developed by teaching a dreary collection of specific reading skills which 
162-rh 
have little or nothing to do with reading or literary appreciation, but which 
have become the unfortunate accompaniment of the back to the basics 
movement and competency- based reading programs. Not only does the 
skills approach fail to encourage the process through which children learn 
to comprehend, but also by virtue of its sterility and lack of interest, it stifles 
children's receptivity to the imaginative worlds represented in literature. 
At the beginning of this discussion, it was argued that many teachers 
have long been using basic approaches to teaching children's literature 
which, though at variance with the current emphasis on teaching skills, 
have proven successful. The reason why these approaches have proven 
successful is that-even though they have often been derived intuitively and 
by trial-by-error - they activa te the process through which children learn to 
comprehend and enjoy literature. The remainder of this paper will review 
some of these basic approaches. 
Developing Linguistic Awareness 
Too often literature is taught as a process of translating literary ex-
pression into conventional expression. The "as if' process of categorization 
is put into reverse. Children learn that their reading task is to transform the 
imaginative experiences they encounter in literature back to the language 
in which these experiences would be represented in the conventional world. 
This approach is wrong and has been recognized so by perceptive 
teachers. For children to grow and develop through their discovery of 
literature and the imaginative experiences literature provides, they must be 
immersed in the reading of literature and not in some arbitrarily prescribed 
program of artificial reading skills. The teacher's role is to encourage the 
child to engage actively in the process of reading literature so that the child 
may learn to form bridges between his existing model of reality and the 
imaginative and fanciful models of reality represented in literature. 
Clear support for teaching based on this approach is provided by 
Bruner's notion of language development and its role in cognition. Bruner 
(1973) has argued cogently that the child uses language to order experience 
and through this to discover reality; language is a tool through which reality 
is manipulated and ultimately understood. When the reality to be un-
derstood is an imaginative one of literary creation, the linguistic awareness 
(Mattingly, 1972) the child requires for understanding is of a very special 
kind, and it is only by the teacher's providing repeated encounters with the 
language of literature and the reality which this language represents, that 
the child will come to understand and enjoy literature. 
Oral Language Activities 
A first step toward developing this linguistic awareness can be listening 
and oral language activities. For example, through the simple act of 
reading aloud to children, the teacher can provide direct exposure to 
literary language and a growing familiarity with the diverse and fanciful 
realities which this language represents. At other times, this exposure can 
be furthered by choral reading. This is particularly appropriate with 
rh-163 
poetry. Through listening to the language of literature and through par-
ticipating in this language orally, the child will gain a growing sense of its 
style and rhythm, and a greater understanding of the meaning literary 
language conveys through its combination of sound and sense. 
Freedom of Choice 
But listening and oral language activities can only serve as first steps 
toward children's own active participation in reading. This raises the 
question of what should they read? Children should be encouraged to read 
the literature they enjoy. Too often we teach what we enjoy ourselves rather 
than recognizing what is enjoyable for the child. The child still possesses 
that sense of wonder which we as adults have largely lost, and this explains 
the often inscrutable (to us) delight which children demonstrate in 
literature we sometimes find bizarre, obscure, or silly. But, by recognizing 
the need for children to read literature which they like, we are not en-
couraging the development in children's minds of some kind of literary 
slum. Rather, we are recognizing that if children's literature is to serve as 
the basis for the development of more refined literary taste, it must in the 
first instance be enjoyable. 
Widening Horizons 
One way to develop children's literary taste is to encourage discussion of 
the literature they read both among themselves and with their teacher. 
Discussion should not focus on dismal comparisons between the events of 
literary creation and "what really could happen," since what really could 
happen doesn't matter in literature. Rather, children should be encouraged 
to explore and extend the full range of the interpretive possibilities 
literature provides by developing more imaginative expectations and 
making more creative predictions. In this way, the language of literature 
becomes the medium through which the worlds represented in literature 
become part of the child's model of imaginative reality, and through which 
extensions of these worlds can be made. 
Conclusion 
If one common conclusion emerges from current concepts of the 
reading process and successful teaching practices, it is that children learn to 
read by reading. It is only in this way that reading becomes joyful- that 
children want to read and continue to waht to read. The more experience 
they have with constructing meaning from the interaction of their own 
experience with the experience they find represented on the printed 
page -no matter how fanciful- the greater will be their understanding and 
enjoyment. This is particularly true of literature. Poetry must be read as 
poetry and not as some deviant form of prose that must be translated to be 
understood, and imaginative prose must be accepted at face value as 
representing worlds which, though detached from reality by virtue of being 
imaginary, are still perhaps possible, at least for one joyful moment. In 
these ways children's delight in the fanciful and imaginary can be nurtured, 
164-rh 
and their sense of wonder enriched and developed. Over one hundred years 
ago, in a utilitarian society preoccupied like our own with the teaching of 
facts and skills, Charles Dickens inHard lzmes recognized the need fur this 
sense of wonder. In the words of Mr. Sleary, "People mutht be amuthed. 
They can't be alwayth a learning, nor yet they can't be alwayth a working, 
they an't made for it." 
REFERENCES 
Berlyne, D. E. Conflict, arousal, and curiosity. New York: McGraw Hill, 1960. 
Bruner, J. S. The conditions of creativity. InJ. M. Anglin (Ed.), Beyond the informatIon 
given. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. 
Bruner, J. S. The growth of representational processes in childhood. In J. M. Anglin 
(Ed.), Beyond the information given. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. 
Bruner, J. S., Goodnow, Jacqueline J., & Austin, G. A. A study of t ht"n king. New York: 
Wiley, 1956. 
Bruner, J. S., & Oliver, Rose R. Development of equivalence transformations in childJ'en. 
Monographs of the Societyfor Research in Child Development, 1963,28 (2, Serial 86), 
pp.125-14l. 
Charlesworth, W. R. The role of surprise in cognitive development. In D. Elkind & J. H. 
Flavel (eds.), Studies in cognitive development. New York: Oxford University Press, 
1969. 
Eliot, T. S. Shakespeare and the stoicism of Seneca. InJ. Hayward (Ed.), Selected prose. 
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953. 
Goodman, K. S. Analysis of oral reading miscues: Applied psycholinguists. Reading 
Research Quarterly, 1969,5, pp. 9-30. 
Gray, W. S. The major aspects of reading. In Sequential development of reading abilities, 
Supplementary Educational Monographs No. 90. Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press, 1960, pp. 8-24. 
Lewis, C. S. On three ways of writing for children. In Sheila Egoff, G. T. Stubbs. & L. F. 
Ashley (Eds.), Only connect: Readings on children's literature. Toronto: Oxford 
University Press, 1969. 
Mattingly, I. G. Reading, the linguistic process, and linguistic awareness. In J. F. 
Kavanagh & I. G. Mattingly (Eds.), Language by ear and eye. Cambridge, Mass.: 
MIT Press, 1972. 
Smith, F. Comprehension and learning. New York: Holt, Rinehart and. Winston, 1975. 
Smith, F. Understanding reading, second edition. New York: Holt, Rinehart and 
Winston, 1978. 
Tolkien, J. R. R. Children and fairy stories. In Sheila Egoff, G. T. Stubbs, & L. F. Ashley 
(Eds.), Only connect: Readings on children's literature. Toronto: Oxford University 
Press, 1969. 


Children\u27s Literature and Back to the Basics

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts Volume 20 Issue 3 April 1980 Article 2 4-1-1980 Children's Literature and Back to the Basics W. John Harker University of Victoria Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/reading_horizons  Part of the Education Commons Recommended Citation Harker, W. J. (1980). Children's Literature and Back to the Basics. Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts, 20 (3). Retrieved from https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/reading_horizons/vol20/iss3/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Special Education and Literacy Studies at ScholarWorks at WMU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts by an authorized editor of ScholarWorks at WMU. For more information, please contact wmu-scholarworks@wmich.edu. CHILDREN'S LITERATURE AND BACK TO THE BASICS Dr. W. John Harker FACUL TY OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA The comprehension of literature places different demands upon children than the comprehension of non-imaginative prose. This is because, in order to comprehend literature, children must enter and understand the highly imaginative worlds of literary creation. Although these worlds are charged with delight for the child, they are at the same time essentially unreal- they are the imaginative productions of their creators. Despite these different demands, the current so-called "back to basics" movement-entrenched as it has become in a growing number of com-petency-based reading programs-asserts that it doesn't matter what is being read; as long as children are taught to apply a highly structured sequence of individual skills, comprehension will result. Many teachers intuitively resist the skills approach, however. They feel that teaching skills alone does not account for how children learn to read, especially when reading involves literature. But teachers need more than intuition as a basis for their resistance; they need a well-documented rationale. The purpose of this paper is to provide one. Through an ex-ploration of how children think and learn to comprehend literature, it will be shown that many practices which teachers now use successfully, but which are at variance with the skills approach, are in fact consistent with how children learn to read literature. It is this consistency which accounts for the success of these practices in the classroom, which explains their intuitive and often long-standing appeal to experienced teachers, and which provides the reason why they should continue to be used in the face of the encroachment of "the basics" on the teaching of literature. Children's Thinking A fundamental question in any discussion of reading comprehension is how is knowledge attained? Put another way, if comprehension involves children in a process of gaining information from the printed page, how is this information acquired and organized in the mind? While definitive answers to these questions are still to be determined, a coherent theory of human cognition and the development of children's thinking has been provided by Jerome Bruner and his colleagues. Bruner maintains that the individual learns about the world through a process of cognitive model building. He theorizes that the individual constructs in his mind a representation of the world founded on his experience which serves as the basis for interpreting his environment. Fundamental to this process is categorization. Bruner defines a category as "a range of discriminably 160-rh different events that are treated 'as if equivalent" (1956, p. 213). For example, the category "dog", by which we describe and cognitively represent all four-footed creatures which characteristically bark and wag their tails, may be made up of dalrnatiam. puudle..,. lockn spa nit·1s and so on. However, all dogs, irrespective of shape, size, or color, are categorized as equivalent. In this way, categorization involves "an act of invention" (Bruner, et aI., 1956, p. 2) by which equivalence is imposed upon observably non-equivalent phenomena. All dogs do not look alike despite the fact that no one would argue that Fido (a great dane) and Spot (a cocker spaniel) are both dogs. For this reason. another way of describing a category is to call it "a rule of grouping" (Bruner, et al., 1956, p. 45). Categorization demands the active response of the learner to his en-vironment. The individual selects certain characteristics of the phenomena he encounters as "defining attributes" (Bruner et aI., 1956, p. 22) which allow him to assign these phenomena to existing categories or to establish new categories. Reality is never approached in an empty headed manner; the individual brings to each new encounter with the world a set of ex-pectations about what he will find there. Four-footed creatures that bark and wag their tails are likely to be dogs. Moreover, once categorized as dogs. a number of other predictions can be made as well-such as these four-footed creatures can be trained to fetch one's slippers or they are not to be trusted around cats. Thus the complexity of the environment is reduced. Each new event need not be interpreted ab ova: the individual's cognitive model tells him what to expect. Developing the efficiency of this cognitive response to the environment is the key to children's learning. Through increasing life experience, children are a ble to reduce the complexity of their environment by developing more inclusive categorizations which permit more accurate prediction. In this way, the world becomes more known and knowable; the information load created by the constant bombardment of external sensory stimuli becomes controlled and ordered. Bruner describes this process of cognitive development in children as one of "finding techniques for being simple with respect to information" (1963, p. 141). Children's Reading The influence of cognitive psychology on current explanations of the reading process has been both direct and profound. Smith (1978), for example, describes reading as a process in which the reader makes predictions about the meaning about to unfold as he reads, and com-prehension as the reader's confirmation of these predictions. Similarly, Goodman describes reading as a "psycholinguistic guessing game" in which the reader "seeks to reconstruct a message encoded by the writer. He concentrates his total prior experience and learning on the task, drawing on his experiences and the concepts he has attained as well as the language competence he has achieved" (1969, p. 15). The common characteristic of these explanations is the importance placed on the child's store of knowledge of the world - his model of rh-161 reality - which he brings to the reading act as opposed to the infonnation he finds on the page or the particular reading skills he may possess. The child does not begin reading as an empty vessel waiting to be filled by the infonnation on the page. Rather, he comes to reading with a model of reality based on how he has categorized his life experience. I t is on the basis of the expectations generated by his model of reality that the child actively seeks to make sense of the infonnation before him. Comprehension results when the child finds consistency between the model of reality he expects to find represented on the page and the reality he in fact encounters there. Children's Literature But what is the model of reality which the child encounters in literature? Hardly the one he has derived from his experience in the real world. Suddenly, that benign, four-footed, barking, tail wagging, slipper fetching, cat-chasing dog can be transformed into a symbol of ultimate malevolence, a Rowsby Woof, diabolical enemy to a struggling colony of socially ordered, highly articulate rabbits who inhabit Watershlp Down. The world of literature is essentially unreal. The metaphors of reality are upset. Despite its apparent or professed reality, the world of literature is a world of imagination and fancy created in the mind of the writer. It is a world which T. S. Eliot has described as providing "the illusion of a view of life" (1953, p. 53). The manner in which this illusion is created has been described by Tolkien as a process of "sub creation," where the writer "makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world" (1969, p. 114). Similarly, C. S. Lewis characterizes the process of literary creation as one of seeing imaginary pictures, some of which "have a common flavour, almost a common smell which groups them together" (1969, p. 218). When children's literature is considered in this way, the child's comprehension task becomes one of understanding alternate models of reality created in the minds of writers and represented in their work. The initial effect of the child's encounter with alternate models of reali ty is surprise - surprise resul ting from defeated expecta tion (Berlyn, 1960; Charlesworth, 1969). What follows surprise is either confusion and frustration, or discovery and delight. Bruner has postulated that "the triumph of effective surprise is that it takes one beyond common ways of experiencing the world" (1973, p. 212). In order to comprehend literature, in order to go beyond common ways of experiencing the world, the child must restructure, at least momentarily, his model of reality in order to accommodate the new reality he encounters in literature. If he fails to do this, comprehension will not occur and the child's surprise will not serve as a catalyst for the discovery of new, imaginative worlds through literature. Teaching Children's Literature How can the teacher develop children's comprehension of literature? It should be clear by now that children's comprehension will not be developed by teaching a dreary collection of specific reading skills which 162-rh have little or nothing to do with reading or literary appreciation, but which have become the unfortunate accompaniment of the back to the basics movement and competency- based reading programs. Not only does the skills approach fail to encourage the process through which children learn to comprehend, but also by virtue of its sterility and lack of interest, it stifles children's receptivity to the imaginative worlds represented in literature. At the beginning of this discussion, it was argued that many teachers have long been using basic approaches to teaching children's literature which, though at variance with the current emphasis on teaching skills, have proven successful. The reason why these approaches have proven successful is that-even though they have often been derived intuitively and by trial-by-error - they activa te the process through which children learn to comprehend and enjoy literature. The remainder of this paper will review some of these basic approaches. Developing Linguistic Awareness Too often literature is taught as a process of translating literary ex-pression into conventional expression. The "as if' process of categorization is put into reverse. Children learn that their reading task is to transform the imaginative experiences they encounter in literature back to the language in which these experiences would be represented in the conventional world. This approach is wrong and has been recognized so by perceptive teachers. For children to grow and develop through their discovery of literature and the imaginative experiences literature provides, they must be immersed in the reading of literature and not in some arbitrarily prescribed program of artificial reading skills. The teacher's role is to encourage the child to engage actively in the process of reading literature so that the child may learn to form bridges between his existing model of reality and the imaginative and fanciful models of reality represented in literature. Clear support for teaching based on this approach is provided by Bruner's notion of language development and its role in cognition. Bruner (1973) has argued cogently that the child uses language to order experience and through this to discover reality; language is a tool through which reality is manipulated and ultimately understood. When the reality to be un-derstood is an imaginative one of literary creation, the linguistic awareness (Mattingly, 1972) the child requires for understanding is of a very special kind, and it is only by the teacher's providing repeated encounters with the language of literature and the reality which this language represents, that the child will come to understand and enjoy literature. Oral Language Activities A first step toward developing this linguistic awareness can be listening and oral language activities. For example, through the simple act of reading aloud to children, the teacher can provide direct exposure to literary language and a growing familiarity with the diverse and fanciful realities which this language represents. At other times, this exposure can be furthered by choral reading. This is particularly appropriate with rh-163 poetry. Through listening to the language of literature and through par-ticipating in this language orally, the child will gain a growing sense of its style and rhythm, and a greater understanding of the meaning literary language conveys through its combination of sound and sense. Freedom of Choice But listening and oral language activities can only serve as first steps toward children's own active participation in reading. This raises the question of what should they read? Children should be encouraged to read the literature they enjoy. Too often we teach what we enjoy ourselves rather than recognizing what is enjoyable for the child. The child still possesses that sense of wonder which we as adults have largely lost, and this explains the often inscrutable (to us) delight which children demonstrate in literature we sometimes find bizarre, obscure, or silly. But, by recognizing the need for children to read literature which they like, we are not en-couraging the development in children's minds of some kind of literary slum. Rather, we are recognizing that if children's literature is to serve as the basis for the development of more refined literary taste, it must in the first instance be enjoyable. Widening Horizons One way to develop children's literary taste is to encourage discussion of the literature they read both among themselves and with their teacher. Discussion should not focus on dismal comparisons between the events of literary creation and "what really could happen," since what really could happen doesn't matter in literature. Rather, children should be encouraged to explore and extend the full range of the interpretive possibilities literature provides by developing more imaginative expectations and making more creative predictions. In this way, the language of literature becomes the medium through which the worlds represented in literature become part of the child's model of imaginative reality, and through which extensions of these worlds can be made. Conclusion If one common conclusion emerges from current concepts of the reading process and successful teaching practices, it is that children learn to read by reading. It is only in this way that reading becomes joyful- that children want to read and continue to waht to read. The more experience they have with constructing meaning from the interaction of their own experience with the experience they find represented on the printed page -no matter how fanciful- the greater will be their understanding and enjoyment. This is particularly true of literature. Poetry must be read as poetry and not as some deviant form of prose that must be translated to be understood, and imaginative prose must be accepted at face value as representing worlds which, though detached from reality by virtue of being imaginary, are still perhaps possible, at least for one joyful moment. In these ways children's delight in the fanciful and imaginary can be nurtured, 164-rh and their sense of wonder enriched and developed. Over one hundred years ago, in a utilitarian society preoccupied like our own with the teaching of facts and skills, Charles Dickens inHard lzmes recognized the need fur this sense of wonder. In the words of Mr. Sleary, "People mutht be amuthed. They can't be alwayth a learning, nor yet they can't be alwayth a working, they an't made for it." REFERENCES Berlyne, D. E. Conflict, arousal, and curiosity. New York: McGraw Hill, 1960. Bruner, J. S. The conditions of creativity. InJ. M. Anglin (Ed.), Beyond the informatIon given. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. Bruner, J. S. The growth of representational processes in childhood. In J. M. Anglin (Ed.), Beyond the information given. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. Bruner, J. S., Goodnow, Jacqueline J., & Austin, G. A. A study of t ht"n king. New York: Wiley, 1956. Bruner, J. S., & Oliver, Rose R. Development of equivalence transformations in childJ'en. Monographs of the Societyfor Research in Child Development, 1963,28 (2, Serial 86), pp.125-14l. Charlesworth, W. R. The role of surprise in cognitive development. In D. Elkind & J. H. Flavel (eds.), Studies in cognitive development. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969. Eliot, T. S. Shakespeare and the stoicism of Seneca. InJ. Hayward (Ed.), Selected prose. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953. Goodman, K. S. Analysis of oral reading miscues: Applied psycholinguists. Reading Research Quarterly, 1969,5, pp. 9-30. Gray, W. S. The major aspects of reading. In Sequential development of reading abilities, Supplementary Educational Monographs No. 90. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960, pp. 8-24. Lewis, C. S. On three ways of writing for children. In Sheila Egoff, G. T. Stubbs. & L. F. Ashley (Eds.), Only connect: Readings on children's literature. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1969. Mattingly, I. G. Reading, the linguistic process, and linguistic awareness. In J. F. Kavanagh & I. G. Mattingly (Eds.), Language by ear and eye. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972. Smith, F. Comprehension and learning. New York: Holt, Rinehart and. Winston, 1975. Smith, F. Understanding reading, second edition. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978. Tolkien, J. R. R. Children and fairy stories. In Sheila Egoff, G. T. Stubbs, & L. F. Ashley (Eds.), Only connect: Readings on children's literature. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1969. 

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Children\u27s Literature and Back to the Basics

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