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out of the plane as Rabbit overenthusiastically launches it in on the
right-hand side.
Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, written and illustrated by Mo Willems
(2003) was the third picturebook investigated in this study. In this
Caldecott Honor winner, a bus driver decides to leave his bus unattended
and asks readers to ensure that Pigeon does not drive his bus. Pigeon
works hard to convince readers that it would be a responsible driver if
only it were given a chance. The page breaks in this book virtually force
readers to respond to pigeon as it reasons, whines, cajoles, throws
tantrums, and otherwise tries to convince readers to let it drive the bus.
In this book, therefore, inferences about the page breaks might be expected
to be «audience participation» in the story, a different type of response
to the breaks.
The fourth picturebook utilized in this study was author/illustrator Peter
McCarty’s (2002) Caldecott Honor winner Hondo and Fabian. Hondo (the
dog) and Fabian (the cat) are depicted as two playful animals having fun
in a variety of situations. For the majority of the text, Hondo and Fabian
spend their day apart from one another, and the stories of the two animals
alternate. Readers must therefore analyze the page breaks as the
parallel stories unfold. The page breaks in this book are different from
the other books because readers must keep in mind what has happened
in the sequence of openings where Hondo is the main character, and the
sequence of openings where Fabian is the main character.
Where the Wild Things Are, written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak (1963)
was the final readaloud in this study. This Caldecott Medal winner is a
favorite of many young children as readers can easily relate to Max’s
desire to escape from his bedroom into a whimsical world constructed in
his fantasy. We were interested in the page breaks of this book for two reasons.
First, it was a book the students knew well already, and we wanted
to explore how students would respond to an invitation to speculate
about page breaks in a book whose plot was already grasped by the children.
Second, the book contains a transition from real-life situations
(Max creating a tent by nailing a hole in the wall to hold one side of a
blanket and Max chasing the family pet) and the fantasy of a forest growing
in Max’s room. We wanted to note whether the students would speculate
about the change in genre from realistic fiction to fantasy.
Taken together, then, the picturebooks used in the study afforded different
opportunities and potentials for children to interpret page breaks.
DATA ANALYSIS
Ms. Brightman transcribed the tapes to ensure accuracy, as she knew the
children’s voices well. Each child was assigned a pseudonym to ensure
anonymity. The analysis proceeded in the following manner. First, each
time the teacher explicitly asked about what might have happened
between page breaks was noted in the transcripts, along with the subsequent
discussion. In addition, every time children spontaneously volunteered
a suggestion about page breaks during the readaloud discussion
without the teacher’s prompting was also noted, along with the discussion
pertaining to the page break. We identified these sections of the
transcripts as Topic Units, hereafter called TUs (Roser & Martinez 2004),
beginning with either (1) the teacher’s question about what might have
happened during the page break or (2) student-initiated comments. The
student conversational turns (Sinclair & Coulthard 1975) within each TU
were then analyzed by coding according to the standard qualitative content
analysis techniques suggested by Strauss and Corbin (1998): first,
assigning conceptual labels to each of the conversational turns about
page breaks within each TU; second, grouping these conceptual labels
into a more limited number of conceptual categories; and third, describing
the «core category» (Strauss & Corbin 1998) as the relationship
among these conceptual categories, in order to answer the research question.
Also factored into the analysis as supplemental data were the spontaneous
comments about page breaks made by children during other storybook
readalouds, their independent reading, and at other times during
the school day.
During this process, the two co-authors coded two transcripts together,
creating conceptual labels, and then independently coded the other
three transcripts, following this by achieving agreement on the conceptual
labels for each conversational turn. When the second stage of coding
began, a graduate student who was interested in page breaks (having
written a theoretical paper on the subject) joined the team, and assisted
in grouping the conceptual labels into a smaller number of tentative conceptual
categories. The formation of these provisional conceptual categories
was done in a series of meetings with all three researchers present.
Following this, the co-authors each coded two transcripts by conceptual
category, and the graduate student coded one transcript. Finally, the
researchers exchanged transcripts and noted any discrepancies in their
assigning of conceptual categories. At a final series of meetings, the three
researchers reached consensus on any disagreements, paying attention to
discrepant cases and modifying the original conceptual categories, thereby
accounting for all the data. Lastly, the conceptual categories were
related to each other, constituting the «core category» that is the third
and final stage of Strauss and Corbin’s analytical model, thus answering
the research question.
An important aspect to note in the analysis is that we deliberately omitted
children’s predictions about what would happen next, because predictions
do not have to do with speculation about what happens between
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