A Child with Much to Teach

Abstract

A Child with Much to Teach Nina Mikkelsen (bio) Crago, Maureen and Hugh . Prelude to Literacy: A Preschool Child's Encounter with Picture and Story. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. In trying to understand how children interact with text and picture, critics often question whether children read differently from adults. In their study of the child's responses to stories, Maureen and Hugh Crago, practicing psychotherapists as well as literary critics, reach some conclusions about this subject as they examine a broader question: how do very young children respond to the books they see and hear? In particular, how do children develop mastery of literary and artistic conventions? In this case the child is Anna, the Crago's daughter, who between the age of twelve months and five years responded primarily to fantasy in picture book and chapterbook for the diary her parents maintained. The Crago study is different from two parent diaries that preceded it. Both Dorothy White's Books Before Five (1954; rpt. Heinemann 1984), which the Cragos say served them as a model, and Dorothy Butler's Cushla and Her Books (Hodder and Stoughton, 1979), are divided in focus between evaluative description of books and a child's response to them, and coverage of each area is therefore reduced. As well as providing evaluations, White and Butler are less systematic about making generalizations about the child's responses; the Cragos conclude each chapter with analysis of Anna's responses. And the Cragos seem to be more consciously aware than their predecessors of the part they themselves play as mediators of the child's literary experience; they carefully note each time they feel their behavior might have been a conditioning factor in the highly interactive process of book-sharing (as when they read, with highly dramatized voices, passages that Anna later memorizes or often quotes). The Cragos provide a more comprehensive account of Anna's response to books than either White or Butler. Part One of their book includes Anna's copious responses (impromptu comments and questions) to six books, each for a different six month period. [End Page 153] Anna's earliest response to books (1.8 to 1.11) is important for revealing from the outset behavior consistently seen throughout the period of the study and often exhibited as well by adult readers: the ability to identify objects and creatures from her own conceptual base, to ask for clarification (through look or sound) of what is puzzling, to memorize text, to make statements of interpretation about a character's behavior, to concentrate silently on certain pictures and thus reveal interest and focus, to imitate adult reading behavior, and to transfer book concepts to actions she herself performs. Response to Where the Wild Things Are (2.1 to 2.6) is important in that Anna was interpreting a character's feelings when she described Max as "frightened," as well as asking questions about what she could not see in illustrations. She was processing, out of her own experiences, new concepts that emerged in pictures (calling Max's scepter first a "football," then a "walking stick," finally a "broom"). And she was attending to pictures according to their sequence, rather than focussing on personal preoccupations (a behavior not always typical for her, but indicating a similar capability to that of the adult). Anna's response to a picturebook version of "Rapunzel" (between 3 and 3.5) reveals her assimilation of new ideas to old experiences, with comments and questions about houses and towers reflecting earlier anxieties about closed doors. Thus cognitive and affective responses were not separate; instead the cognitive statement often indicated the underlying emotion. Reading of Hugh Lofting's The Story of Doctor Dolittle (3.11 to 4.5) showed that a child's thin level of verbal response could work positively to reveal what her perceptions were. When Anna concentrated on the earlier parts of the book and then made frequent reference to the character of the Barbary Pirates, who appeared later in the story, she revealed a grasp of what the authors call a "basic binary structure," in which a familiar character or creature, after leaving a familiar place, encounters an unfamiliar...