Ways to take learners into texts

How to enter and open the conversation between writer and reader. 

How do we take learners into texts, and once in, how do we foster a dialogue between writer and reader? The trick for us is to help our pupils to share the emotions and experiences experienced by the characters in a story and then to gently shift some of their attention onto the techniques being used by the writer to tell us what they want to us to know. Empathy is a key starting point, of course, but then we have to see that writers are not always explicit (or even very sure) about their characters’ emotions or the impact of what they experience. They are more likely to show us through the ways they describe the world in which that story takes place. 

How our pupils learn from everything they read is about giving them the language they need to talk about what they are learning about a writer’s technique. It’s about recognising and using the names of those techniques. 

Preparation of a text for reading with learners in their last two years of Primary Education might build and grow from offering some of the following six overarching questions and bits of information to your students. 

1. Why this book? 

Give this book a place in that classroom conversation which aims at, producing readers and at the same time challenge those for whom reading is part of their life? Discuss the blurbs. Make a trailer. Start a ‘why do I read?’ and ‘what I have read’ wall space in the classroom. 

A really powerful way to begin a new text can happen through the way you prepare the classroom for the first encounter with the text: bring the learners into the world of the text, rather than bring the text into the world of your classroom. Arrange the room in a new way: alter the configuration of the desks and chairs, change (or lower) the lighting, use atmospheric music as the learners enter, scatter relevant pictures or quotations around the room and, most of all, insist on silence as the children enter, walk around and absorb the world they have entered. Only then, before they sit, ask them to turn to the nearest person to them and discuss briefly what they are seeing and hearing. 

2. Where am I? 

Make connections between the book in question, other books and individuals’ own experiences of reading. Is the book you are about to read, ‘low threshold, high challenge’- will it draw in reluctant enthusiastic, independent readers. What is the best question to ask on Page 1? Does the writer open the door into the world of the story by telling the reader where they are or by pushing them straight in without explanation?
Some techniques to highlight to learners: 

• A traditional way to open a story is with an exposition, a description of time, place, background and people.
• More recent novels try to hook the reader quickly by using a technique called, in medias res, ‘in the middle of the action’.
• Does it become clear very early on that the reader is about to be given a story within a story? This is a useful framing device. Ghost stories often use this device to make the story seem real. Sometimes the story is ‘framed’ by a repetition: see Graham Swift’s short story, Chemistry for instance.
• How much are you being told on the first page of the story? Look, for instance at the first sentence of, There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom and the first sentence of, Private Peaceful. What are the clues about time and place? 

3. Who am I with and where am I going? 

Why do we read stories and why do writers write them? 

A first answer might be that they are for showing us what other people are like. A second answer might be that they are showing us what kind of people we might like to become. 

Whose voice can I hear through the story? 

Are you hearing a voice which is: 

• –  on the outside looking in (an omniscient narrator);
  
• –  one pair of eyes (a first person narrator);
  
• –  a bit of both – moving in and out of characters’ heads (free indirect style)? As an example, have a look at the opening of, The Boy in Striped Pyjamas and Street Child. What is that voice like? 

Who is speaking to us?

Stories are always told by a distinctive and identifiable voice. If the writer is on the outside looking in then that is a story with an omniscient narrator. Sometimes that voice is authoritative, sometimes hardly noticeable. If the voice belongs to the main character in the story – like Greg in The Diary of a Wimpy Kid for instance – it is obviously a first person narrator. Sometimes the writer moves in and out of the characters’ head – telling you what that individual is thinking but also describing them from the outside. This free indirect style means we hear more than one voice and point of view. Look at the way the perspective shifts at the end of Penelope Lively’s story, ‘The Darkness Out There’ for example. 

What if I can’t hear a voice coming through the text? 

If you cannot hear a voice, you are probably not reading a story – but your science text book or some flat-pack instructions or guidance on how to repair your bike. This writing is usually in the passive voice – it sets out to be factual and anonymous. Sometimes a writer will pretend to write in the passive voice – as a disguise. The writer is a real person with a point of view, even if they are trying to hide behind the words.

How important to the writer is a decision about which voice to use in the story?
In the end writers of stories use these techniques to ‘hook’ you into the story they have to tell: to convince that these are real people with real things happening to them, or to make the reader feel not only that they are being given access into other people’s lives but are sharing in what happens to them. 

4. What can I read between the lines? 

• Can the reader find patterns through spotting repetitions of scenes – or words – or images? 
• Does the story have an ‘inner tune’ or motif there all the time but just beneath the surface? 
• Does the story have echoes of another story?
• What can we know about the world from stories? 

The Greeks called the sort of knowledge we glean from fiction, phronesis. Entering the imagined world of a story requires us, on the one hand to accept and understand the ‘rules’ of that world, whilst on the other hand use those reading experiences to illuminate our own world. To hear what the writer is saying and to talk back. Novels and stories have changed over time. They have moved from having a fixed meaning to relying on the participation of the reader. Emily Dickinson says that writing should, Tell all the truth but tell it slant, stories explore the ‘circumference’ rather than express a confident ‘centre’. A centre suggests certainty and faith, a circumference suggests doubt. Stories which were once controlled by an omniscient narrator, which set out to communicate a clear moral, are in recent times sparser and even fragmented. The author holds the threads but is not in the privileged position s/he once was in the days of Jane Austen or Thomas Hardy. Emily Dickinson’s use of the dash at the end of lines says it all. She is reaching out to the reader to invite us into dialogue and alternative interpretations. 

So if the writer is not telling us what to think in direct and obvious ways, where do we start? 

Stories, like music, have motifs running through them. Like ‘earworms’ – they can be powerful, mesmerising ‘inner tunes’ which will not leave us alone. These repeated tunes are there in stories too. They draw our attention towards the threads which run though a story. Once our attention has been focused on a repeated scene, or word, or image or idea we can then engage in a discussion about how those repeated elements provide us with a wider glimpse of what the story adds up to. 

5. Where does the story leave me? 

A consideration about the way stories end might begin with a discussion of what this means. What was the final ‘pay-off impact? Was the ending a neat ‘wrapping up’ and resolution or did it leave the reader with more questions or with feelings that have proven hard to shake off? A writer leads us towards the endings deliberately, not accidentally. Sentences have full stops, stories do not. 

The Framing Device 

In the telling of ghost stories or fantastical tales we often ‘hear’ the story being told to the writer by another person. This device implies that the story must be true because someone told me and that person is real; it gives the tale credibility and is the most obvious example of a frame. Wuthering Heights, where Nelly Dean tells Lockwood about past events, is a good example of this – as is the story of Davy in Cloudbusting, the telling of which begins and ends the novel. 

Framing devices work in other ways too – not just as a vehicle to carry the plot. Restless by William Boyd begins and end with a scene in which an elderly lady stands near woods with binoculars looking for an intruder she is certain will appear at any moment. Graham Swift’s story, Chemistry, begins and ends with an image of a toy boat crossing a pond in a park, the first time for real, the second time at the end of the story, in the narrator’s imagination. The point is, in both stories that things have changed during the course of the narrative, but not entirely. The underlying tensions which have driven the story are still there. 

Short stories are often ‘end oriented’. This is less so in a novel simply because it’s longer and more complex, but how it will all end is probably one of the main reasons we keep on reading. In either case a story often takes us, in one way or another, back to the beginning. The word ‘plot’ has been defined as a ‘completed process of change’ (RC Crane). Sometimes that completion brings us back to the present; sometimes it gives us an explicit explanation so that the process of change described through the plot is ‘wound-up’. The reader is left feeling fairly clear about what the author wants them to understand. 

Something more than plot? 

Sometimes stories are framed by a symbol rather than a straightforward plot device. Sylvia Plath’s short story, Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit begins by telling us that when she thinks about the year WW2 began she can ‘recall the changing colours of those days, clear and definite as patterns seen through a kaleidoscope.’ She calls that time the ‘days of my technicolour dreams’. 

Accused of a crime she didn’t commit and believed by no one, even her favourite uncle, the story ends with her feeling that everything has ‘dissolved and vanished, wiped away like the crude drawings of a child in coloured chalk from the blackboard of the dark. That was the year the war began and the real world, and the difference.’ 

The story is ‘framed’ by these two images, the first colourful and intricate, the second colourless and flat. The first image evokes childhood, the second, its loss. Colour is used here as a symbol. One way of unwinding the way a story’s frame works is to think about whether the ending makes the writer’s view explicit or not. 

To sooth or not to sooth: how does the writer want me to feel at the end? 

If the ending of The Boy in Striped Pyjamas is not exactly a ‘twist’ it certainly is a shock. A good example of how the writer (John Boyne) wanted to be truthful rather than soothing at the end of his story. Henry James sneered at the reader who wanted a novel to end with, ‘a distribution of the last of the prizes’ and ‘cheerful remarks’. Do we want a story that wraps everything up tidily, or do we think uncertainty is closer to real life? The question to ask at the end of reading a story is: what did the writer want to say to me and how far does the way the story end make those intentions clear? 

6. Where next? 
Learners need the tools to move freely around the ‘linguistic universes’ offered by reading and talking about books. In particular, the learner’s critical awareness can be enhanced by introducing and using appropriate vocabulary and fit-for- purpose technical terms. Words like narrative, symbol, framing, exposition, empathy and so on need to become a natural part of the conversation. 

The comparative texts suggested above are certainly about challenge: long reads, making comparisons and spotting differences. Some of the texts address delicate issues, like illness and injury; others have a strong element of fantasy and offer new ways of thinking not just about people and society, but also about language and its possibilities. 

All or some of these things promote questioning, empathy, curiosity, decision making, the consideration of new ideas and recognition that fiction is not a passive copy of reality but rather deliberately crafted in order to get us to rethink our perceptions. This wished for familiarity with those ‘linguistic universes’ will give learners the confidence to review what has been experienced, and to surround the other demands that are made on them, by a culture of tests and assessments, with a context of challenge and enjoyment so that they feel some control over where their own learning is going. 

If you are interested by any of the ideas above you can discover what they look like in far more detail in ‘Redefining English for the More Able: A Practical Guide’ By Ian Warwick and Ray Speakman (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Redefining-English-More-Able-Education/dp/081535309X/)