Reading, an aesthetic experience

In the concluding part of her article on young learners, PREMA SRINIVASAN writes on the ways to make children read, and offers Dirda's 13 commandments for a steady reading habit.

IT is necessary to bear in mind that the present-day narrative techniques sometimes make greater demands on the reader through the use of narrative devices such as the participant narrator and the "multiple point of view" method. To illustrate her theory of "efferent" reading, Rosenblatt quotes the example of the eight- year-old boy who, upon hearing Alice's White Rabbit consulting his pocket watch, countered; "But rabbits do not go about wearing watches." The author's purpose has been to stress the need for the suspension of judgment while reading a piece of fiction. What was necessary was a change of focus, so that the boy would have been content to live in the moment, devoting his attention to the story experience without concern for its connection with practical reality." However, all readers, adult as well as children, approach the text with a set of expectations or schemata, which they have acquired on the basis of experience. Children, for instance, could predict the actions of a cartoon cat, based on "what we have seen cats do in many previous cartoon episodes". Sometimes these expectations are fulfilled and sometimes they are not. Even if the expectations are upset, there is a sense of the unexpected which fulfils the reader's desire for the out-of-the-ordinary.

The presence of an adult intermediary between the world of the child and the text that is generated by the adult is inevitable. The adult is not only concerned with the production of the text as the author and the publisher but also is concerned with the consumption of the book as a parent and teacher. The adult needs to be ever at hand to select, guide and, to a certain extent, aid the meaning-making process. John Rowe Townsend, who takes the business of children's literature very seriously, makes an ingenious classification between "child people" and "book people". Although this seems a very basic division, it makes sense while analysing the status and intent of children's reading material. The "child people" are the parents, teachers and librarians who are directly involved in making books available for children. The "book people" are the publishers and authors who are involved in books production. Both the groups will have to consider the suitability of the books and balance it with the needs and interests of the children to whom they are offered. Publishers and authors share the moral responsibility of offering books of value to children; these books are in turn monitored, selected and made available to the child reader by the "child people" at home and in the school environment.

At home, parents constantly complain about the distractions of the visual media which definitely make forays into the time allotted for reading. However, it is possible for the discerning adult at home to monitor television time and use good programme to lead the child back to a classic. Recently televised serials of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice or Dickens' Great Expectations did manage to draw many children to the original texts with increased interest. This is the age of CDRoms and the internet, which make the possibilities of the interactive media endless. Instead of indulging in a futile wish to put the clock back to an Arcadian era when books were the sole medium of entertainment, it is wiser to work together with the visual media. Just as the ubiquitous cartoon strip can be a stepping stone for further reading, television serials, audio cassettes and the CDRoms can be an innovative gateway for young learners who will eventually come to value the advantages which reading has over other sources of entertainment. The sense of discovery, suspense and quest present in the well-thumbed story-book cannot be really matched by the visual media.

Everywhere, in academic as well as non-academic circles, the main issue seems to be: "But how do you make the child read?" Joan Aiken, the celebrated chilren's writer, points out that reading aloud to the young has a wholesome influence that remains with them for the rest of their lives. She says, "Reading aloud was a daily habit in our family. My mother read aloud to me; she also read to my brother (12 years older) and my sister (7 years older)... my step-father and my mother read to each other. Evening by evening they worked through War And Peace or the Journals of Andr Gide or all the Barchester novels. And I, as soon as I was old enough to do so, read aloud to anyone who would listen: my mother and I plugged our way steadily through the Bible, one of us reading and the other slicing beans (or whatever); besides this, all of us would sometimes have reading tea. Every member of the family was allowed to bring a book to the table and silently munch while turning the pages." Eleanor Cameron, not only a novelist but a critic of children's literature, admits that her childhood reading still remains with her. She says with reference to Kipling's Jungle Book, "The whole of Kipling's jungle rises up in my mind. The years fall away and there is no distance at all between the time I was 10 and now." So Graham Greene's statement that it is only in childhood that books have much power over us cannot be accepted. They continue to run beneath our consciousness as a steady subterranean stream of delight and wonder for the rest of our lives.

Michael Dirda, in his article, on "Children's Readings", has listed what he calls 13 commandments as essential for nurturing a steady reading habit:

Read aloud to your children at least an hour a day.

Read yourself. Unless the children note your preference for books to watching television, they are not going to take books seriously. Children unconsciously imitate their parents even in their leisure time pursuits.

Fill your house with every kind of reading material: paperbacks, classics, comics, magazines and newspapers. Books should be a part of a family's daily life with each having his or her own shelf of books.

Visit the library and book store with your children. Even a reluctant reader may be tempted to try a glossy-looking book.

Older children should be encouraged to read to their younger siblings. It will be considered as a fun-time for the younger child and an opportunity to improve the skills of the older child and provide the much-needed "bonding" between siblings.

Limit and monitor television, video and computer time. Your goal should be not to deprive the child of television but make the child indifferent to its subversive influence.

Encourage interest in all categories of books: adventure, science fiction, history or suspense.

Discuss the books with them so that they realise on their own what is second rate and recognise first class writing.

There is no need to thrust "good" books down their throat, but mention your own experiences and they will learn from the discussion.

Encourage children to write. By writing stories, journals and letters, young people learn about the structure of fiction, the flow of sentences, the importance of usage and the nature of argument.

Children can be taken to meet authors at "book signing" occasions. A book becomes special when the author has signed on it. Usually, authors are willing to talk about their books particularly with a juvenile audience.

Do ask librarians and book-sellers for advice about the suitability of a book to the intended age group.

Most important of all, children should be given time to read at home and school. Allow them to read late into the night. Quiet reading time should be encouraged and an hour at school would also contribute to the establishment of a reading habit.

Dr. Richard Bamberger of Vienna, who is regarded as the father of Austrian children's literature, makes a few practical suggestions to promote the reading habit amongst children. Since he heads the Textbook Research Society in Vienna, he is greatly concerned with the future of reading all over the world. At school, he suggests, the teachers should start reading aloud from a book, presumably fiction, for ten minutes or so and ask the children to read silently for another fifteen minutes. After this, there can be a discussion on the narrative scheme and the session can conclude with the end still remaining a mystery. This method would encourage the child to take up the story back home and perhaps finish it. To achieve what seems to be an impossible task, it may be worthwhile to heed R. L. Stevenson's dictum on "reading", after all, he understood children better than most of us: "... the process (of reading for the child) itself should be absorbing and voluptuous. We should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with busiest kaleidoscopic dance of images... it was for this pleasure that we read so closely and loved our books so dearly in the bright, troubled period of boyhood." This dance of images will be an effective guide for young people to absorb the pleasures and uses of reading. Reading can be a lifelong source of delight, and, if educationists work on this basic premise, in time "leisure reading" will become as vital to the child reader as the academically prescribed texts.

(Concluded)

The first part of this article was published last week.

(c) The Journal of English Language Teaching (India)

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