Formar Leitores para Ler o Mundo - Leitura Gulbenkian - Fundação ...

46
long as the children actively contributed meaningful thoughts and ideas
to the conversation. Each of the readalouds for the study lasted about 50
minutes, and resulted in an average of 31 transcripted pages.
Data were collected over a two-week period in May, near the end of the
school year, so that the children’s responses throughout each readaloud
reflected their extensive knowledge of a wide array of literature. They
had already been exposed to well over 150 readalouds, and were quite familiar
with the interactive style during story time. They also knew the teacher
encouraged a wide range of responses, rarely asking questions to which she
already knew the answer. By this time, Ms. Brightman had created a cohesive
«interpretive community» (Fish 1980), with implicit and explicit
rules about what «counted» as literary response during storybook
readalouds. Furthermore, the children were familiar with much of the
metalanguage of picturebooks, such as «doublepage spread» and «full
bleed». This mode of participating interactively in storybook readalouds
had been introduced gradually and spontaneously over the course of the
year by Ms. Brightman, who was adept at perceiving authentic teachable
moments. Her typical approach was to mention picturebook terminology
in passing, for example saying, «Here are the endpapers». In subsequent
readalouds, she repeated this terminology until the children
began to utilize it independently, demonstrating that they had internalized
the appropriate use of the «language of picturebooks» (Sipe 1998).
As part of the school district’s second grade literacy curriculum, children
were expected to be familiar with various literary genres. Ms.
Brightman’s way of teaching distinctions among the genres was to
expose children to a large variety of stories and to construct an increasingly
sophisticated list of genre characteristics, which were then added
to a wall chart in the library corner of the classroom over the course of
the school year. As stories were read aloud, children often referred to this
chart to interpret and discuss the books’ literary genre. In other words,
Ms. Brightman’s general style was to build the children’s literary understanding
and knowledge of terminology in a very gradual, naturalistic
manner. She thus tended to eschew direct explicit teaching in favor of
allowing the children to construct this understanding for themselves,
while providing appropriate scaffolding.
PROCEDURE FOR INTRODUCING THE IDEA OF PAGE BREAKS
In order to capitalize on this rich background in a naturalistic way, Ms.
Brightman introduced the idea of page breaks by simply asking, «What
do you think happened between here [showing one doublespread] and
here [showing the following doublespread]?» after she had read the second
doublespread. We note that Ms. Brightman did not ask specific
questions such as «How much time do you think might have gone by?» or
«What do you think X might have done?» during the page breaks, because
we wanted to know how the children would respond with a simple general
question. Ms. Brightman did not ask this question for every page
break, but only a limited number of times during the reading of each
book. In this way, the idea of interpreting page breaks was planted in
children’s minds in a subtle way, within the context of an already familiar
literacy practice. We did not want to overburden the children with
interpretation of page breaks; rather, we intended to introduce the idea
of thinking about page breaks as one of the many items in the children’s
«literary tool box» (Bigler-McCarthy 1996).
BOOKS USED IN THE STUDY
The first readaloud in this study was No, David! written and illustrated by
David Shannon (1998). In this Caldecott Honor winner, Shannon endeavors
to recreate a book he wrote as a young child in which his mother
repeatedly uttered the words, «No, David», every time he behaved inappropriately.
This picturebook contains sparse text (Ghiso & McGuire
2007), with only a few words on each page opening, and we felt that this
would prompt the students to create more dialogue for the page breaks.
As well, the book is episodic, with one naughty action by David after
another. Most of the page breaks depict these separate actions, and are
not necessarily joined by anything more than their place in the sequence
of behaviors. Some of the breaks, however, clearly bridge two openings
that are part of the same episode. We were interested in how this variation
in the nature of the breaks, as well as the sparse text, would invite
children’s inference-making.
The second picturebook explored with the students was My Friend Rabbit,
written and illustrated by Eric Rohmann (2002). In this Caldecott Medal
winner, Rabbit must enlist the help of his animal friends to retrieve
Mouse’s airplane from a tree. Although Rohmann’s picturebook contains
more text than Shannon’s story, it is still limited and thus much
of what occurs between each page had to be carefully examined and
interpreted by the children. The page breaks in this book are invariably
connected by the plot, which is not episodic (as in No, David!) but cumulative:
Rabbit finds an ever-increasing number of animals to help
retrieve the airplane. Thus, inferences about these breaks could be
expected to create coherence in children’s understanding of the cumulative
assemblage of animals. As well, the story actually begins on the
title page, with an illustration of an opened package and Mouse sitting
proudly in the airplane, which is a present from Rabbit. We were interested
in how the children might interpret the page break leading to the
next doublespread, which depicts Rabbit about to launch the plane on
the left-hand side of the opening, and the illustration of Mouse falling
47