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Why would this be important? I suggest that to invite children to speculate
about «what happened» between one page opening and the next is to
engage them in a complex and critically important process, because this
speculation automatically engages children in high-level inference-making
because the discussion is about the gap or indeterminacy that the page
break represents. In other words, we theorize that by asking the question
of what happens between two openings, we are encouraging children to
verbalize what may be going on in their minds as they build coherence
through inference. This is an alternative to approaches that advocate
«training» in making inferences (Dewitz, Carr, & Patberg 1987) or teaching
one strategy at a time (Keene & Zimmermann 1997), and allows for the
integration of comprehension strategies, an approach Pressley (2003) believes
is more powerful than teaching isolated strategies. Finally, discussion of
page breaks answers the call by seasoned literacy researchers for ways of
teaching comprehension in the primary grades, rather than focusing almost
exclusively on decoding (Pearson & Duke 2003).
METHOD
The research question for this descriptive, naturalistic study was: In what
ways does a class of 6 and 7 year-olds interpret the page breaks in five
selected picturebooks as the books are read aloud by their classroom
teacher?
DATA
Data for the study consisted of complete transcripts of audiotapes of the
reading and discussion of No, David! (Shannon, 1998), My Friend Rabbit
(Rohmann 2002), Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! (Willems 2003), Hondo
and Fabian (McCarty 2002) and Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak 1963). We
chose these books (all Caldecott Medal or Honor winners) after carefully
examining their page breaks and concluding that these page breaks
offered an especially rich variety of potential «gap-filling» by the children.
This variety is specified below when we describe each book.
None of the books had been read aloud in the classroom before, though
some children were already familiar with some of the books, and almost
all of the children had heard Where the Wild Things Are in a different context
– in another classroom or at home. In this way, we hoped to capture
children’s interpretations for books that were entirely new to them as well
as books with which they had some prior familiarity, contributing to the
naturalistic quality of the study. Data also consisted of fieldnotes, in
which Ms. Brightman (who was the classroom teacher) kept track of the
times when the children spontaneously commented about page breaks
during their independent reading, other times during the school day, or
during readalouds that were not part of the study.
CHILDREN AND CLASSROOM CONTEXT
The data were collected in a self-contained second-grade classroom located
in a K-3 public school, which served a middle-class suburban community
in the Northeastern United States. The class consisted of eleven boys
and twelve girls: two African Americans, two Hispanic Americans, one
Asian American, and 18 of European descent. Two children in the classroom
qualified for free lunch, three received special education services,
and six participated in a pull-out program of basic skills reading instruction.
Ms. Brightman, the classroom teacher, was in her seventh year of
teaching, having spent the great majority of these years teaching either
first or second grade. She had completed a master’s program in literacy
that avoided a deficit perspective (Valencia 1997), emphasizing the literacy
knowledge children brought to the classroom rather than the knowledge
they did not possess. She envisioned children as active learners in
a socially interactive environment. She had also been a co-investigator
(with Sipe) on a number of prior research projects involving young children’s
literary understanding, and had been asked by her school district
to teach a professional development course entitled, «Interactive
Readalouds in the K-3 Classroom». This course demonstrated her interest
in utilizing picturebooks, not as mere tools to teach decoding and low-
-level comprehension skills, but rather to increase children’s critical thinking,
literary meaning-making, and complex understanding of stories.
The children in this classroom were actively engaged in meaningful literacy
activities throughout the school day. Ms. Brightman began every
morning with a storybook readaloud, followed by language and word
study, reader’s workshop (including guided reading), and writer’s workshop.
The children were accustomed to responding to text and illustrations
during readalouds in an interactive and dialogic manner
(Barrentine 1996). In other words, the children actively responded before,
during, and after the reading of each text. Ms. Brightman gathered her
students in the library corner of her classroom. Before introducing a new
picturebook, she reminded the students that they did not need to raise
their hands if they had something to share about the text or illustrations.
Because the students were encouraged to speak freely and to direct their
comments to one another, much cross-talk (Nystrand 1997; Chinn,
Anderson, & Waggoner 2001) was noted. Ms. Brightman understood her
role to be as a facilitator for a meaningful conversation, not a controller
of the discussion. She demonstrated her deep listening by allowing the
children agency and then acting on what she learned from them, rather
than acting according to a preconceived agenda (Paley 1986; Schultz
2003), an art that is easier said than done. The children were comfortable
with this approach to interactive readalouds and thus Ms. Brightman
permitted the students’ exchanges to continue with little interference as
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