Enjoyment of stories in terms of role identification.

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It has been established that childrens' books reveal certain schemata such as the association of a dog with a boy and a cat with a girl (Kuethe, 1966). These schemata appear to be well established in our society buc it is possible that some of the established schemata are inappropriate for minority groups. Motivation to do school work and read assigned textual material is often a problem with children from minority groups. It is possible chat one reason these children are noc motivated to read assigned macerial or to pursue discretionary reading is the failure of the child from a minority group to identify with white, middle class culture portrayed in the usual school text. Many of the basal texcs used in American classrooms today depict an environment of deception. Minority group children can see little resemblance between their lives and stories of immaculately dressed parents and children living in a pleasant home surrounded by a white picket fence. It is doubtful if minority group children are able to relate to stories with such an unrealistic setting. In order to determine whether the possibility for role identification influenced the reading preferences of minority group children, three similar stories were selected for study. Two stories were selected from basal texts, while the third was written and illustrated by E. The first story was about a white boy who lived in a nice home in the country; the second concerned a boy who lived in a foreign country; while the third story depicted the life of a Negro boy in an urban environment. These stories were presented to 21 Negro boys and 19 Negro girls who were pupils in the fourth grade of a large metropolitan school system. The children read the three stories in random order and then were asked to judge which one they preferred for a future classroom reading assignment. Thirty of the children preferred the story about the Negro child while seven chose the story about the country boy and three chose the one about the child in the foreign country. A chi square test was significant beyond the .001 level. It was evident that the children in the sample greatly preferred to read a story where they could identify with the principal character. The importance of depiccing more realistic settings for the urban child has been recognized in many of the newer basal texcs.