Primary English: Knowledge and Understanding - Medwell Jane A. 2014

The Qualities of Stories

TEACHERS’ STANDARDS

A teacher must:

3. Demonstrate good subject and curriculum knowledge

✵ have a secure knowledge of the relevant subject(s) and curriculum areas, foster and maintain pupils’ interest in the subject, and address misunderstandings

✵ demonstrate a critical understanding of developments in the subject and curriculum areas, and promote the value of scholarship

✵ demonstrate an understanding of and take responsibility for promoting high standards of literacy, articulacy and the correct use of standard English, whatever the teacher’s specialist subject.

4. Plan and teach well structured lessons

✵ impart knowledge and develop understanding through effective use of lesson time

✵ promote a love of learning and children’s intellectual curiosity

✵ contribute to the design and provision of an engaging curriculum within the relevant subject area(s).

8. Fulfil wider professional responsibilities

✵ take responsibility for improving teaching through appropriate professional development.

Curriculum context

National Curriculum programmes of study

This knowledge is designed to underpin the teaching of the Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 programmes of study for English, which state, for example, that pupils should be taught

in reading to:

✵ develop pleasure in reading, motivation to read, vocabulary and understanding by:

listening to and discussing a wide range of stories at a level beyond that at which they can read independently Y1/2/3/4

continuing to read and discuss an increasingly wide range of fiction, poetry, plays, non-fiction and reference books or textbooks Y5/6

being encouraged to link what they read or hear to their own experiences Y1

becoming very familiar with key stories, fairy stories and traditional tales, retelling them and considering their particular characteristics Y1/2/3/4

increasing their familiarity with a wide range of books, including myths, legends and traditional stories, modern fiction, fiction from our literary heritage, and books from other cultures and traditions Y5/6

recommending books that they have read to their peers, giving reasons for their choices Y5/6

identifying themes and conventions in a wide range of books Y3/4/5/6

recognising simple recurring literary language in stories Y2

✵ participate in discussion about books that are read to them and those that they can read for themselves, taking turns and listening to what others say Y2

✵ participate in discussions about books that are read to them and those they can read for themselves, building on their own and others’ ideas and challenging views courteously Y5/6

✵ explain and discuss their understanding of books, both those that they listen to and those that they read for themselves Y2/3/4/5/6.

Early Years Foundation Stage

The Early Learning Goals specify that, by the end of the Early Years Foundation Stage, children should:

✵ listen to stories, accurately anticipating key events and respond to what they hear with relevant comments, questions or actions.

Introduction

Trainee teachers need to know a lot about imaginative literature for children — especially stories. This is because stories provide ideas and models that relate not just to reading but also to speaking and listening and to writing.

Analysing different kinds of fiction requires knowledge of some literary critical procedures and understanding of some technical terms. Making judgements about different kinds of fiction is a highly subjective operation and takes us into the realms of opinion, taste and even prejudice. One person’s great book is another’s turkey! In order to make judgements some criteria are needed and this, too, presents problems. Any criteria depend entirely on the purpose for which the judgements are being made and a particular story might be excellent for supporting some aspects of required teaching but very poor at supporting others.

What is sure, however, is the value of fiction in children’s cognitive learning and in their personal development. From the Early Learning Goals through to Key Stage 2 — and beyond — a wide experience of both reading and working with stories is advised. Why should this be? What is so important about stories? The answers to those questions open up many issues.

REFLECTIVE TASK

Read Andrew Davies’ frank and funny account of his reactions to reading Tom Sawyer as a primary school child. It is to be found in Children’s Literature in Education, March 1997, Vol. 28 (1): 3—10.

Now recall a book that was important to you during your primary school years and try to list some of the qualities that made it special for you. What implications do your memories have for you as a teacher selecting books for children?

Why are stories important?

Stories are important for teachers and children for many reasons — some pedagogic and some personal. Here are some of the reasons.

✵ To satisfy curiosity — we want to know what happens next.

It is a common technique in primary classrooms to provide children with the opening of a story and then ask them to continue it. The opening may come from anywhere — newspaper cuttings, TV programmes, fairytales, jokes, books, even — if all else fails — out of the teacher’s own head. But the important thing about the opening, whatever its source, is that it should catch children’s interest and make them want to carry the story on — to provide an account of what happens next.

That is probably the most important thing about reading stories as well as writing them. They catch our interests and imaginations and they make us want to know what happens next. We may be disappointed in the way that some stories develop; we may be puzzled; we may be surprised; we may be delighted; we may be entranced; but the underlying urge for reading stories is to find out what happens next. We get interested in the people and in the situations and we want to know who are the winners and who are the losers in their outcomes. That response to stories is one of the reasons why they are so important to teachers. They are natural arousers of interest and, as any teacher will agree, it is much easier to teach interested children than uninterested ones.

✵ To help us make sense of the world.

What made you want to become a teacher? What made you pick this book up? What are your plans for the future? The answers to all those questions are a series of causes and effects. They are stories. We all think in stories. We make sense of events in our lives by telling stories about them. We really know that the way we live is not neat and tidy with a convenient beginning and a middle and an end — except for birth and death. But within that universal beginning and end there is likely to be a very confused, and confusing, and a very individual middle. If your life is typical of most people’s it is probably very messy indeed. Things overlap and get disorganised and messy.

Nonetheless, we insist on trying to impose some kind of order on the mess and the order we impose is the order of story. We spend much of our time with stories — exchanging tales and gossip, reading newspapers, watching the TV, dreaming and fantasising. We tell stories to ourselves and others about what has happened to us — and through stories we test out possibilities about what might have happened or what might happen in the future. Stories are the way we try to make sense of the vast range of amorphous, often unrelated experiences that we have. We organise it, shape it, give it a starting point and an ending point, and try to give it a coherent shape that real life events don’t really have. We turn aspects of our lives into an enormous number of stories. In that sense, everybody is a story maker if not a story writer, and reading stories gives us, and children, valuable models, both structural and linguistic, for the creation of our own.

✵ To experience the world vicariously — by sharing and perhaps learning from the experiences of others.

When writers write their stories they often draw on their own experiences or on those of other people for raw material. They might need to make a few adjustments for particular narrative purposes or to avoid libel actions, but real experience generally is at the heart of stories. That’s why many writers keep notebooks to jot down scraps of dialogue or to note interesting situations or aspects of behaviour. They want to use what they can from real life to make their books sound true. Even in fairy or fantasy stories there needs to be some sense of reality in what characters do and why they do it; of cause and effect. Readers have to believe that, in the world the story presents, the characters would behave in the way that the author tells us they do behave. One common reason for a reader abandoning a story is that it is too daft — it could never happen.

Stories, therefore, provide readers with access to a vast databank of other people’s experiences from which they might learn in the living of their own lives. Indeed, some people find it easier to understand life better from the stories of other people than from their own personal experiences. By spending time in school with stories — helping children to become sophisticated readers and makers of stories — we are helping them to understand life as it is lived by others and perhaps making them wiser human beings.

✵ To put us in touch with a common culture.

Stories contribute to a literary culture that forms an important thread in any social fabric. They are one of the bonds that tie us together. Virtually every child born in Britain shares a vast story heritage. You will, for instance, have little trouble in immediately completing all of these titles and the list could probably be extended into hundreds: Jack and the…? Harry Potter and the…? Alice…? Charlie and…? The reason you can do that so easily is that the stories in question have been either listened to or read by you and all of your peers at some point in your lives. You share a great many narrative points of reference.

Stories also give us access to a world tradition — an international multicultural narrative culture. Stories, particularly folk and fairy stories that happen ’Once upon a time’ and therefore out of the present, and in lands far away and therefore non-existent lands, give us a shared humanity. The same stories and characters — or very similar ones — crop up over and over again in widely disparate cultures. Rumpelstiltskin, first collected and written down by the Grimm brothers in Germany, is none other than our very own Tom-Tit-Tot, first collected and written down by Joseph Jacobs in Suffolk. Anansi the Spider Man — with his cheerful resilience and constant assertion of the power of the ingenuity and imagination of the little person over brute strength and stupidity — who began his life in Africa before being taken, as Anancy, to the Caribbean with the slave trade and then emigrating to Britain in the 1950s, is instantly recognisable as both Aunt Nancy and Brer Rabbit from the southern states of America.

Out of this similarity between characters comes a similarity of themes. Many fairy and folk tales from all cultures, for instance, are moral in purpose, underlining that children (especially little girls) should be aware of the many dangers around them. The sensible course of action for them is to do as sensible adults — particularly mothers and fathers (though not stepmothers and stepfathers!) — tell them to do. The woods, the forests and the jungles contain all sorts of nasty possibilities and if children don’t do as they are told then they are likely to be imprisoned by witches, eaten by wolves or, as in an African story, swallowed by drums! There are all sorts of complex symbols at work in fairy and folk tales, which give them a meaning far deeper than their surface one. Such stories also provide lessons in what positive qualities to cultivate — qualities like kindness, generosity and compassion — particularly to humble people and to animals. The spider that you do not tread on could easily turn out to be the king of the spiders with remarkable powers to have on your side in an emergency; the toad you are nice to might just turn out to be a handsome prince under a spell; and the old lady you meet gathering sticks in the forest might be your fairy godmother. There is no doubt that stories like these give us a shared humanity, and as Britain becomes increasingly multicultural the range of stories that forms part of its culture constantly extends.

✵ To help to improve children’s literacy.

Children should develop through the key stages not only in the range of stories that they are familiar with but also in their ability to read them, understand them and respond to them. Stories provide a great deal of the raw material for work at word, sentence and text level to enable children to develop their understanding of and skills in phonics, grammar, levels of meaning and the linguistic and structural conventions of a range of genres. Stories give children material with which to extend their ability to use a range of strategies for reading and responding.

Stories have long been regarded as a key element in developing children’s literacy. Most preschool children have stories read to them, and hearing and responding to stories is one of the key elements of the Early Learning Goals. It is well known that many young children want to learn to read so that they can read stories for themselves and not rely on a willing adult. Unfortunately, many reading schemes contain custom written ’stories’ that are not particularly interesting in their own right, but form part of the scheme because they use and reuse certain words in sentences of a preordained length. They have controlled vocabulary and grammatical structures. This obviously limits a writer’s range and the result is that many reading scheme stories are very dull compared with the real stories that children read for themselves and have read to them.

RESEARCH SUMMARY

Gordon Wells’ (1985) longitudinal project on children’s language development at home and at school pointed out the role of stories in developing children’s literacy skills and their abstract thought processes. Children most successful in literacy tests at ages 7 and 11 could all be positively identified as having had experience of stories told or read to them before beginning school. Wells argued that the process of understanding the world presented by stories obliges children to use decontextualised language by creating a world inside their heads.

He made even stronger claims for the importance of stories by arguing that they contribute very positively to children’s wider learning. His research evidence supported the view that in order to understand a story a child has to pay particular attention to symbolic language. This requires high levels of cognitive thought. The child who listens to or reads stories regularly spends more time using these high levels of thought than the child who does not. In other words, stories make children smarter.

✵ To help children extend their knowledge and experience of language forms.

It is generally through stories that children get their introduction to written language. Like spoken language, written language is complex and has many forms, but it is often very different from spoken language. A writer is aware that all a reader has available to help them make meaning is the text itself — the words and the pictures on the page. There can be no help from intonation, repetition, emphasis, gesture or any of those other aids that spoken language often calls on. In written language, therefore, vocabulary is often much more precisely selected, structures are more formal and grammatical rules and conventions are more rigorously adhered to than in spoken language. This is not easy for children to learn, and stories provide interesting and satisfying models of one form of written language in action.

Stories also have their own narrative conventions which are peculiar to them and which must also be learned because children don’t meet them in their other day-to-day language experience. Nobody actually says or even writes ’Once upon a time’ or ’They all lived happily ever after’, for example, in any context other than stories — unless they are deliberately referring to story conventions.

RESEARCH SUMMARY

In her detailed analytical study of the stories told by five children between the ages of four and five, Carol Fox (1993) demonstrated that the children had all acquired an understanding of the way that stories operate structurally and linguistically. She called this modus operandi a ’story grammar’. She argued that the children had made this acquisition so early and painlessly because they had all had a great many stories read to them in their preschool years.

✵ Because they have the propensity for giving children great pleasure.

This is a reason that teachers must not forget as they work hard to cover the curriculum. The pressure to raise literacy standards is intense and, unless teachers are careful, there is the possibility of seeing stories in school as little more than a means of reaching that particular end. However, for some of the reasons already given, that should not be the case. Stories have enormous potential for enriching people’s lives and teachers must take care not to limit that potential by treating stories as just a vehicle for skills teaching.

A parent tells the tale of her six-year-old, a story lover, who was asked what story she would like at bedtime. She chose one, but then asked her mother, ’Please just read me the story, mummy. Don’t make me talk about the cover.’

What are stories?

The answer to that question may seem self-evident. They are accounts of events — real or imaginary. Because they are accounts, they tend to be chronological — the order in which events happened is the order in which they are narrated. They involve people doing things in places. In other words, they have characters and actions and settings. The things that the people do and the way they relate to one another form the sequence of events in the stories and constitute the plot. The plots of good stories have a significance that goes beyond the simple ’what happened next?’ They are about something. They have themes. Betsy Byars’ books have splendid plots, characters and settings — the things that happen and the people to whom they happen are interesting and powerful and funny — but that is by no means all there is to them. The books do not stop at plot level. A book like The Eighteenth Emergency may relate the events that arise from the arresting circumstance of what happens when a sensitive, arty and very engaging boy labels a picture of a prehistoric man with the name of the school bully — unaware that the bully is behind him as he does so — but it also presents some ideas and some questions to the reader about the nature of fear and how it can be coped with and about friendship and social relationships. This exploration of ideas and the raising of questions together constitute the themes of the book, which are presented through the plot.

Stories tend to be told in the third person (he/she/they) by a narrator who knows everything about the events and the characters — including what they are thinking and feeling — and tells us in all the detail considered appropriate. Normally these narrators like to keep their heads down and simply tell the story. They are not generally part of it. However, some writers do like to get involved. If we take two immensely popular writers for children, we can see two quite different approaches to this issue. Enid Blyton never becomes part of a story. Hers is the narrative voice simply recounting what happened to Noddy or the Famous Five or the Old Saucepan Man. We never get to know much about Enid Blyton herself from the texts, beyond what is implicit in the kinds of things she chooses to describe, the kinds of language she chooses to describe them in and her presentation of the characters she chooses to create. Roald Dahl, on the other hand, can never remain in the background for long and he regularly shoulders his way into his stories he tells in order to speak to the reader directly and in his own voice. Such is the power of his presence that he almost becomes a character in the stories in his own right. The famous opening to The Witches is an example of this.

The last two paragraphs suggest what stories ’tend’ to be. But creative writers (and some of our very best and most creative of writers use their talents to write for children) are constantly looking for unfamiliar and intriguing ways of telling stories. So the statements made in the paragraphs are by no means invariably true. Stories do not have to have a single plot line presented chronologically. There can be more than one plot line with a number of sub-plots being developed, or flashbacks to the past or visions of the future. Nor do they have to be told in the past tense by an omniscient narrator. Stories can, for example, be told in the first person (I or we) past tense with the narrative voice being that of one of the characters. In other words, the author is choosing to speak through one of the characters in the story. Of course, the author is still writing the story and is in control but considers that the story gains something by letting one of the characters appear to be doing the writing work for them — assuming the narrative voice. Anne Fine’s Goggle Eyes is an example of this technique. In Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson (a constant experimenter with a variety of narrative voices) has two narrators, Ruby and Garnet. They are a pair of identical twins each with their own perspective on events in the story — and much of the story is told through direct addresses to the reader, conversation (in which the respective characters are differentiated by print font), notebook jottings and cartoons. Jacqueline Wilson’s own narrative presence is minimal though, of course, she wrote everything, so her authorial presence is total. In Florence Parry Heide’s and Judith Gilliland’s The Day of Ahmed’s Secret (brilliantly illustrated by Ted Lewin) there is an extreme rarity — a first person narrative but told in the present tense.

Passing the responsibility for telling the story to one of the characters in it certainly has some advantages. It helps the reader to understand the character of the storyteller more thoroughly; it makes for greater immediacy because the reader is brought much closer to the events of the plot by having the information provided by somebody who is apparently part of it; and, because of increased immediacy, it perhaps gives a greater sense of realism. But against that, a writer has to consider that authorial omniscience has been lost. Because characters and events in the story are only seen through one person’s eyes, we can never know how another person truly sees events and thinks or feels about them. The storyteller/character has no means of knowing this. Only the author can know because they are making up the story, but the author has chosen to put the story into the mouth of somebody else and so has no individual voice. It is in stories told through one of the characters that we can most clearly see the difference, which exists in all stories no matter how they are told, between the voice and views of the author and the voices and views of the characters in the plot.

PRACTICAL TASK

Read at least three books by different ’significant children’s authors’ in which you consider different narrative techniques are being used and analyse those techniques. If your knowledge of stories for children is limited at this stage and you are stuck for inspiration you might try stories by Anne Fine, Philip Pullman and Jacqueline Wilson. Note particularly the verb person and tense of the story, the possessor of the narrative voice, and the extent of the author’s involvement. Decide why you think the author has chosen to adopt the particular technique in the story, the advantages and disadvantages of the technique and which of the three books you prefer. If you are feeling particularly creative, take the opening of one of the three books and rewrite it from a different point of view by using a different narrative voice.

Story genres

Stories come at us in a variety of forms and a variety of types. As far as forms are concerned we can have, amongst others, picture books, pop-up books, make-your-own story books, books with holes through them, books with tabs to pull, buttons to push and flaps to lift, and straightforward, common or garden narrative books. As objects they can be short and fat, long and thin, multicoloured or plain, very small and, of course, big. Amongst the types there are fairy stories, fables, myths, mysteries, adventure stories, school stories, fantasy stories, science fiction stories, funny stories, tragic stories, historical stories, futuristic stories and many more. These types of story are all genres of story and have their own characteristic generic language and narrative styles.

Consider these two openings:

Once upon a time there was a little girl called Goldilocks. One day she was walking in the forest. She had been walking for a long time and was tired and hungry. To tell the truth, she was lost. Suddenly she came into a clearing. In the clearing there was a little house. Goldilocks walked up to the house to see if anybody was at home.

We get back late on Tuesday and I have a reccy round the living room and kitchen. Something is wrong. I try to tell the others. ’Look/I say’, ’somebody’s been in here. You got eyes. Use them. Look at the evidence. That porridge! Tampered with. Yeah? That chair! Busted. Right? See them strands of yellow hair around the place. Look at us. Three brown bears. Anybody here got yellow hair? Speak up. I’m talking to you. Anybody? Nope. Nary a yellow hair between us. For all you bears know we got a serial killer sleeping upstairs on one of our beds. Somebody’s been in here when they got no right and I mean to find out who.’

They are, of course, both telling the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears but they are telling it in different ways. The first is the more traditional of the versions with its instantly recognisable ’Once upon a time’ opening, its omniscient narrator, its imprecise setting in place and time, its vague and rather suspect landscape of little girls walking alone and getting lost in dark woods, its very simple sentence structure and its past tense, chronological narrative.

The second is more like a detective story. It plunges us straight into the action but does not have an omniscient narrator. It is told by one of the characters and therefore has the advantages and disadvantages of first person narrative discussed earlier. The sentences are again short but this time not for simplicity but in order to give pace. The opening uses a lot of direct speech and the language is very informal with grammatical errors and slang words. It uses phrases that we generally associate with crime and criminals.

You may prefer one opening to the other but this is a matter of personal taste. They are generically different and the language and the structures and the narrative devices that are used help to define this generic difference.

PRACTICAL TASK

For this task, use the three stories that you read for the previous task. This time classify each story generically. Is it a love story, adventure story, fairy story, myth, legend — or what? Your response to this will almost certainly, and quite rightly, be to classify the story according to its content. But now go on to examine the stories for their language and their narrative styles and find words, phrases or narrative techniques that seem to you to be typical of the particular genre of the particular book.

Story structures

Whatever genres they are written in and whatever their linguistic differences, stories tend to have a similar overall structure. They have what is sometimes referred to as a story grammar. The shape, if not the detail, is consistent and they work in the same very general ways. Teachers are required to know these general ways in order to be able to talk with children about details of stories and in order to help them with their own story writing.

Aristotle famously wrote of the need for plays to have a beginning, a middle and an end — by which he meant that there should be a clear starting point, a coherent and comprehensible development, and a satisfying conclusion. Teachers often make the same requirement of children in their story writing — but that is not particularly helpful if the children are not well informed about the language of beginnings, about the ways of cohesively linking aspects of the story in a development or about the linguistic indicators of endings. Stories can help to provide young readers with this kind of knowledge through modelling it.

It may seem obvious to say that stories have to have an opening. But, obvious or not, they do. Readers need some indication very early on of when and where a story takes place and who is in it — of time, setting and character. If a writer withholds that information for very long then readers become exasperated.

The simplest kind of opening is undoubtedly the classic fairy tale one which often performs all three functions in one simple sentence and may go something like:

Once upon a time, in a far-off land, there lived a rich king.

Everything is there in splendid economy. When? ’Once upon a time’ — a marvellously evocative phrase that has no precise meaning but gives a mysterious sense of some time out of time. Where? ’in a far-off land’ — a similarly imprecise phrase that gives the story an exotic feel and removes it safely from the boundaries of normality. In far-off lands anything can happen, and, in this story the reader hopes, will. Who? ’a rich king’. The adjective and the noun combine to tell us all that we need to know about this fellow. He has all the power that money and status can give, but our knowledge of stories tells us that money and power will not be enough to prevent some rum things happening to him as the story takes its course and he will probably find that money and power do not always make for an ordered and trouble-free existence. Such openings are brilliantly effective because they plunge the reader into the situation with maximum clarity and minimum fuss. Most modern writers choose to work in a more sophisticated way and concentrate on one of the issues — setting or character are the likeliest — and then they fill in other details as they become relevant or necessary.

The opening to a story goes under several pseudonyms depending on which genre theorists you want to trust. It is known in some places as the ’Orientation’ or the ’Exposition’. Others, who regard the events of a story as a kind of hiccough in the normality of things, see this part of a story as ’The State of Equilibrium’. This suggests that the situation at the beginning of a story is about to change — as, of course, it undoubtedly will. Otherwise there is no story.

The opening of a story is often the most difficult part of a story for children to read (and for writers to write) because it tends to contain the most information and the least action. The scene has to be set in some way and the situation and characters established. Most stories, as we have seen, are told in the third person and it is often in the opening that the authorial omniscient narrative voice is most clearly heard — before the events of the story kick in and the plot gets under way. The opening, therefore, establishes the relationship between writer and reader. It tells you what kind of a person the writer is and suggests what kind of person the writer thinks the reader is. It is important that they are going to get on together and the opening is the preliminary testing ground. It needs great care. Many books are thrown down, never to be picked up again, because the reader finds the opening to be dull and uninspiring.

After the opening, things start to happen and there is generally a moment when we realise this. It may be known as the ’Inciting Moment’ and it is signalled linguistically in phrases like ’One day’, or ’now it happened that’. There are other names for this point in a story, like ’crisis’ or ’problem’. It is the moment when the state of equilibrium is about to be threatened, when normality starts to become abnormality. It is the moment when the wolf springs from behind a tree to speak to Red Riding Hood on her way to her grandmother’s house, the moment when Alice leaves the boring security of the river bank and her sister’s side to follow the white rabbit, or when Charlie finds Mr Willy Wonka’s last golden ticket. Bruner (1986), who sees the structure of story as essentially a trip away from the normal into the abnormal — and then back again — in fact refers to this moment as the ’breach’. Others talk about ’complicating action’ or ’disruption’. Call it what you will, it is an important moment in the structure of a plot because it is where events start to move and the story starts to get up a head of steam.

After the inciting moment, the action becomes more involved in a plot through the ’Development’ stage. There are further crises, problems, complications and disruptions, which interrelate in the narrative structure and which the writer has to present as clearly but as interestingly and vividly as possible. The development stage of more complex stories generally contains a number of events or episodes. Little Red Riding Hood has her various transactions with the wolf dressed up as her granny, Alice moves from wonder to wonder, each becoming ’curiouser and curiouser’, and Charlie has his adventures with the assortment of terrible kids in Mr Wonka’s chocolate factory. The development stage is almost always the largest section in a story.

When the development is complete and the whole plot is about to be rounded off, there is often a moment when something happens that makes the ending of the story possible. The wolf has his mouth open to eat up Little Red Riding Hood when the woodcutter leaps through the window with his axe poised; Alice, now up to her normal size, contemptuously sweeps aside the playing card courtiers; and Willy Wonka makes Charlie a present of his chocolate factory. These moments are moments of ’denouement’ when the reader can sense that the ending is coming up. An alternative term for this moment is ’resolution’, and after this moment we generally are bundled helter skelter into the ’ending’.

The ’ending’ is precisely what Aristotle considered it should be — that part of the story where all complications are resolved and redressed, normality is restored and the events of the plot are concluded. Other terms for this point in the story are ’redress’, ’reinstatement’, ’conclusion’ or ’coda’. The world at the end of the story is not quite the same as the world at the beginning. The wolf is dead, Alice is wiser and Charlie is richer, but the hiccough of abnormality is over and everybody can live happily ever after — a phrase, which, significantly, ends so many fairy tales. They probably won’t, of course, because that is not the way of life but we, as readers, won’t know because this particular story is finished. New but generally untold stories would certainly affect the characters if they had any existence at all outside a writer’s imagination or a reader’s head or if they had any substance at all beyond words and pictures on a page.

PRACTICAL TASK

Use one of the books that you read for the previous two tasks and examine the narrative structure carefully. Decide what the author is establishing in the opening (Time? Place? Setting? Character?) and determine where the ’Inciting Moment’ is to be found. Decide whether the development presents a single strand plot or whether there are one or more sub-plots. How many episodes can you identify in the development stage? Determine the point of ’Denouement’ in the story and how the writer re-establishes normality in the ending.

Evaluating and making judgements about stories

Here is where we hit tricky territory because literary judgement is ultimately a very personal matter. Even when the same evaluatory criteria are applied to a piece of text, different people’s conclusions about its quality can vary enormously. If that were not the case and everybody thought the same, then the world would be a duller place, argument about books would disappear and literary critics would be out of a job! So all anybody can do is remember the criteria, apply them honestly and make their own judgements on the basis of their responses. It should be remembered that it is possible to appreciate the authorial qualities of writers without actually liking their work much. What is important is to keep an open mind and perhaps look again at the work of writers to whom others react differently from you.

Here is the opening of a book for Key Stage 2 primary children:

Jackson was thin, small and ugly, and stank like a drain. He got his living by running errands, holding horses, and doing a bit of scrubbing on the side. And when he had nothing better to do he always sat on the same doorstep at the back of Paddy’s Goose, which was at the worst end of the worst street in the worst part of the town. He was called Jackson, because his father might have been a sailor, Jack being a fond name for a sailor in the streets around Paddy’s Goose; but nobody knew for sure. He had no mother, either, so there was none who would have missed him if he’d fallen down a hole in the road. And nobody did miss him when he vanished one day and was never seen or heard of again.

It happened when Christmas was coming on — about a week before. Dreadful weather, as hard and bitter as a quarrel. Dreadful weather, with snow flakes fighting in the wind and milk freezing in the pail.

Jackson was out in it, sitting on his doorstep with his hands cupped together just above his knees. There was a whisker of steam coming up from his mouth and another from between his hands. It wasn’t his soul going up to heaven, it was a hot pie from a shop round the corner where he’d been scrubbing the kitchen since before it was light.

Fair’s Fair by Leon Garfield (1981)

This is a splendid opening for a number of reasons.

First, the setting, situation and character are established quickly and vividly enough to seize readers’ interest and make them care what happens next. It involves them quickly. Who, where and when are clearly defined — though the reader is not told but has to deduce the Christmas of roughly which year the writer is referring to. There are enough clues in the text, though, to make this a comparatively simple job. An enormous amount of basic information is packed even into the first paragraph and readers will want to know more.

Second, the writing is vivid, direct, imaginative and original. There are similes and metaphors that are lively and new. The weather is conveyed in a very effective simile: ’as hard and bitter as a quarrel’. The snowflakes’ movements are presented in the vivid metaphor ’fighting in the wind’ and the steam from the pie becomes a metaphorical ’whisker’. There are no flat character stereotypes or puddingy writing in image-free simple sentences here. This is a writer who is taking language by the scruff of the neck and making it work for him spectacularly hard. Images are arresting and vivid. Sentences attack and grab the reader with their rhythm — ’the worst end of the worst street in the worst part of the town’ — and their balance — ’It wasn’t his soul going up to heaven, it was a hot pie from a shop round the corner’. This writing is being done by a real writer who is not remotely interested in how many words he’s got in a sentence or making sure that the vocabulary he uses is phonically consistent. He simply wants to write what he wants to write as effectively as he possibly can in his own individual style.

Third, the story so far is likely to begin to stir some vague feelings in the reader. It’s funny, but there is menace there too. Jackson is due for disappearance. How? When? Why? This opening tells us that the book is going to entertain but is probably going to raise some questions as well. We may never have met him but we trust the writer of these words to continue to interest and involve us. He sounds a very entertaining chap who is prepared to treat readers without patronisation and as intelligent human beings. We want to read on.

However, that very same opening may affect some readers quite differently and stun them into boredom. Ultimately the decision is always going to be subjective and depend on personal taste and experience. Readers are never all going to like exactly the same things. There is much debate amongst literary critics about precisely how texts carry meaning. A shared view in the debate is that meaning exists in the relationship between the words on the page and the life experiences and attitudes of the reader. The words are always the same. The reader is not. A country-born child almost certainly reacts differently to Dick King-Smith’s stories of farm life than does a town-born child because the reactions are coming from different experiences and understandings. A town-born child might well think the notion of a pig acting as a sheep dog in The Sheep Pig both unlikely and ridiculous. A country-born child might not be so dismissive, knowing the intelligence of pigs, and be more interested in the particular breed of sheep that are being rounded up. In this sense if no other, reading is a very active process. There can never be complete agreement over the value of texts because readers are all different. However, it is very helpful if teachers can justify their own reactions to a book as a model for when children are required to do this, and there are some criteria you might start from. Remember, though, that different readers might well come to quite different conclusions in responding to the very same criteria.

Criteria for evaluating stories

Appropriateness

As children mature, their interests inevitably change. It is important that teachers are able to choose books that are appropriate in terms of subject matter and language to the children with whom they want to read the book. This is not always as easy as it sounds. Picture books, for example, are often thought of as the appropriate form for Key Stage 1 children and no higher. But a book like Raymond Briggs’ Fungus the Bogeyman is clearly not appropriate for Key Stage 1 and not just because of the nature of some of the jokes. There is no problem with the snot and slime stuff — Key Stage 1 children are as at home with snot and slime as anybody else! There are other contextual, linguistic and practical reasons. Such reasons include the range of the references in the book, the difficulty of the language, the variety of fonts, the size of the print, the complexity of the layout and even the colour of the text and the pages. All of these combine to make it a very difficult book to read physically. It is often enjoyed for the first time by Key Stage 3 or 4 pupils or even adults. A book like Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are poses some difficulties of level and appropriateness because, though its word count is small, its sentences are short, its pictures are large and its central character is a child — appearing to make it an obvious Key Stage 1 text — the sophisticated relationship between the pictures and the words and the complexity of the themes being explored make it perhaps more appropriate for Key Stage 2. Many of Judy Blume’s books, like Are You There, God, It’s Me, Margaret, use vocabulary and sentence structures that are very simple and apparently make them ideal texts for Key Stage 2 children, but the themes generally appeal to a rather older reading audience and some Key Stage 2 teachers are not always comfortable in working with the books with still immature children.

It is certainly important that stories do not patronise children in terms of language and content, but, on the other hand, they should not be over challenging or they will not be read or enjoyed. Nor should stories for children patronise them in terms of morality or sentiment. Charlotte’s Web is a very tough book. From the outset, Wilbur the pig is threatened with slaughter because he is the runt of the litter. He is protected and saved by the unlikely combination of a little girl, a rat and a spider, but Charlotte the spider dies. The book pulls no punches about the harsh realities of daily existence and has remained immensely popular with children because of that (even though they often cry at moments in the book — as do their teachers!).

Social awareness

This phrase, together with its companion — ’political awareness’ — is often used as a term of mild derision as though to attempt to present class, culture and gender in unbiased and unstereotypical ways was unworthy and absurd. However, it is important that books for children do reflect the world in which they live and not that in which some adults think they live and teachers need to consider this aspect of any books that they choose to work with.

Much literature for children written before 1950 is middle class in its values and attitudes, all white in its characters, and shows clear expectations of the way boys and girls should behave and the interests they should have. The world has moved on since Hurree Jamset Ram Singh at Greyfriars (Frank Richards in the Bunter stories might at least have checked out Hindu and Sikh names!), the Swallows and Amazons on the Norfolk Broads or the Cumbrian Lakes (though at least the girls in the Arthur Ransome books are forces to be reckoned with for the most part) and even the wonderful William Brown and his boy band of Outlaws in rural village England. This is not, of course, to say that all those stories now have no value. They are generally well crafted, splendidly vigorously written and thoroughly entertaining (especially the William stories), but they all portray a world that is no longer experienced by the vast majority of children. This can well be an issue to be considered by teachers should they wish to read those books with children.

More modern writers are generally at pains to be more accurate in their portrayals. Bernard Ashley, for instance, writes of working-class children in state primary and secondary schools as they really experience them, Anne Fine returns regularly and brilliantly to themes of gender roles and expectations, and children of different ethnic origins now assume their place quite naturally in the work of virtually every realistic writer for children. If they do not, then teachers need to question the usefulness of the story to their class.

Plot and themes

The plot of a story is what really holds the interest. It is mainly the plot that stimulates a reader’s curiosity and the desire to read on in order to find out what happens next. Teachers need to make judgements about whether the plot of a particular story is appropriate to the children with whom they intend to read it. This certainly does not mean that a story has to reflect directly the lives that the children in question live. Stories are wonderful vehicles for extending and enriching children’s experience vicariously. It does mean, though, that the events and relationships in a story need to be comprehensible to children given their age and stage of intellectual and emotional development, and that it is constructed and told in such a way that it not only entertains, excites and intrigues children but it says something that is worth saying. This is not always an easy judgement to make given the range of children in most primary school classes and the fact that some stories make different appeals at different ages. The events of Ted Hughes’ Iron Man, for example, a story magnificently constructed and told, can be understood by children as young as five, but its true complexity is probably not grasped by children until they are at the top end of Key Stage 2.

RESEARCH SUMMARY

This is not strictly an academic research summary but refers you to a key article by a ’significant children’s author’ about his own view of his best known story. In Children’s Literature in Education, (1970) Vol. 1 (1) pp55—70, Ted Hughes considers the meaning of Iron Man.

His book, he argues, is about the human need to come to terms with its own darker side and to put its energy to creative use, rather than try to destroy it. Iron Man himself — with his enormous power for destruction — is first befriended and understood by Hogarth, the child hero of the story, and subsequently makes his spectacular contribution to bringing the Space Bat Angel Dragon into harmony with humanity. This is not a set of ideas easily grasped by a Key Stage 1 class but does demonstrate that stories can make demands of their readers at deeper and deeper levels as underlying themes become relevant to them.

As we have seen, good stories go beyond mere plot and it is important that the themes they explore are also relevant and comprehensible to the children. This does not mean that they have to be simple or comfortable. Charlotte’s Web is neither of those, nor is the best work of Philippa Pearce or Philip Pullman. Even ’fun’ and funny and apparently very simple writer/illustrators like Pat Hutchins, Babette Cole or John Burningham produce extraordinarily theme-rich texts. Mere escapism in books that offer nothing beyond their plots is fine in moderation. It accounts for the continuing enormous popularity of Enid Blyton, but children are far more likely to read this for themselves at home and teachers need to supplement it in school with stories that go beyond mere escapism.

Characters

In a famous phrase, E.M. Forster wrote of ’flat’ characters and ’round’ characters in literature. By ’flat’ characters he meant characters who remain exactly the same throughout a book. By ’round’ characters he meant characters who change and grow as a story progresses. The best stories for children (as for adults) are largely peopled by round characters — characters who are described so carefully and who behave so convincingly that they live and breathe on the page and whom the reader actually gets to care about. This can happen at any level of book. With the sparrows, we implore Peter Rabbit to exert himself to escape from Mr McGregor’s net because we like him and we don’t want him to die, and at the end of the story he is a different, much chastened bunny from the one who paraded around and tempted fate in his new blue jacket at the beginning. We just know that he will never go stealing carrots from people’s gardens, against his mother’s express instructions, ever again. He has grown and changed. At the end of Mark Twain’s story, Huckleberry Finn is a sadder and wiser figure than the one who, admittedly rather grumpily, agreed to play Tom Sawyer’s childish games of adventure-story brigandry at the beginning. In both cases, the characters are so skilfully created and presented that children of appropriate age can easily identify with them and share their experiences.

Language

An author makes characters and events accessible to the reader and draws the reader into a story through language. Sometimes language can be effectively used and sometimes not. A most obvious requirement is that the language an author uses must be appropriate for and comprehensible by the child audience. Again, this does not mean that the children should not be challenged, but if the difficulty of the language means that the children cannot decode it, or have to go scurrying to the dictionary every two minutes to check for meaning, then the language is not appropriate. Sometimes, of course, the context of a word can make it comprehensible, and sometimes authors can explain a word’s meaning by other means. When Beatrix Potter announces in the first sentence of one of her books that the effect of eating too much lettuce is said to be soporific, she quickly goes on to say that personally, she has never felt sleepy after lettuce. Sometimes the meaning of every word is not overwhelmingly important because the story itself is so intriguing that individual words do not matter all that much — as long as the general gist is clear.

However, in the best stories, the language is not only comprehensible; it is rich and inventive. Similes and metaphors are imaginative. The story writer tells the story and expresses the thoughts and feelings of the characters in vivid ways. When characters speak, they speak in ways that seem realistic, with something of the rhythms of real speech and using vocabulary, phrases, idioms and structures that seem appropriate to the speaker. Any of the stories meant for primary school readers by Philip Pullman give clear examples of this.

Illustrations

Illustrations can serve many purposes in stories. They can simply freeze a moment, show a character, enhance a mood, or help children to decode words by providing additional information and context. In the best picture books, however, the pictures add meaning by complementing the words or by relating in witty or ingenious ways with them. In Pat Hutchins’ Rosie’s Walk, for example, the pictures tell quite a different story from the words so that the reader gets two stories for the price of one. Anthony Browne’s words are often very simple but the accompanying pictures present quite a different and surreal world and need to be lingered over to pick up all the visual jokes. In John Burningham’s ’Shirley’ books, the pictures on either side of the central gutter illustrate quite different but co-existing states of being. The important thing about illustrations is that they should have vitality, imagination and freshness. Again, these adjectives mean quite different things to different teachers, and their own judgement in relation to the children they are teaching becomes crucial.

The book as an object

No matter what the quality of the story, there are matters of presentation that are important to children — and to adults for that matter. Books need to be visually attractive, with an appropriate size of font and a reader-friendly layout. This is particularly important for primary school early readers because where pages are cluttered or the print too small with too many words to the line, a reader’s interest and enthusiasm soon wane.

PEDAGOGICAL LINK

Children pick up a book first because they are interested in it as an object. Publishers know this and ensure that the cover is bright, colourful and attractive. If books are displayed in classrooms or school libraries with the spine out, then the attractiveness of the cover is lost. Try to make sure that as many books as possible — and particularly the ones you are recommending at any particular time — are displayed so that the publisher’s hard work can be put to use and the covers can be seen.

PRACTICAL TASK

New writers for children are constantly appearing. It is important that teachers keep up to date. There are a number of ways of doing this and a list of possibilities follows. Make sure you do at least one of them.

✵ Visit a bookshop regularly and browse in the children’s section.

✵ Visit a library regularly. Browse and ask advice from the children’s librarian.

✵ Read reviews of children’s books: there are specialist journal publications, the TES and Sunday broadsheet newspapers have reviews, the bookseller Waterstone’s produces a yearly Guide to Children’s Books and Penguin publications has its own The Good Book Guide to Children’s Books.

✵ Look regularly at the books that specialist book clubs or publishers are offering. Letterbox Library lists form a particularly up-to-date and multicultural source of information.

✵ Listen to children’s views. Children introduced most teachers to Harry Potter!

Teacher interest

As well as ensuring that the stories you choose for your class meet all of the above criteria, remember that you will make it more interesting for children if you like the text yourself.

No teacher ever made a book interesting for children when she didn’t like it herself.

A SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS

Good stories are natural arousers of interest and curiosity.

They provide a framework for organising experience and an opportunity for extending it.

They provide access to a national and international cultural heritage.

They contribute to the development of literacy and of the capacity to learn.

They extend children’s knowledge about language.

They give pleasure and should never be seen just as vehicles for teaching skills.

Stories are accounts of events that fall into several genres.

They may be told in a variety of ways though their basic structure is similar.

There are a number of criteria that can be used to evaluate stories. These criteria relate to plot, theme, characters, language, illustration and layout.

M-LEVEL EXTENSION

Any work with children and stories depends on a teacher’s knowledge of texts. This does not just mean knowing about the language, structures and narrative devices of stories; it means knowing who are the good writers most likely to stimulate your class. That, in turn, means reading a lot of stories for children. This task is a long-term one. It is to read at least one book for children every month for the rest of your training and teaching career. This is a minimum requirement. It would be far better to read more stories more often, but other matters sometimes press. Start to build up your own lists of stories that you have evaluated following analysis of the key features, as described in this chapter, noting which age groups you feel they will be best with. Start with the three books you worked on in the Practical Tasks and add to the list as often as you can.

FURTHER READING

Applebee, A.N. (1978) The Child’s Concept of Story. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. This is a book which is a modified version of a PhD thesis and is therefore both technical and academic. It provides illuminating insights, via case studies, into the way that primary children develop in their acquisition of story grammar, although, leaning heavily on the work of Vygotsky, it does tend to go into rather more complex analytical detail than most teachers really need.

Bettelheim, B. (1989) The Uses of Enchantment. New York: Random House. Here Bettelheim examines some of the meanings and interpretations of a range of folk and fairy tales as well as the contribution that they make to children’s cognitive, emotional and social development.

Davies, A. (1997) ’Tom Sawyer’. Children’s Literature in Education, 28(1): 3—10. An amusing account of the author’s reactions to reading the book as a primary child.

DfE (2013) Teachers’ Standards. London: DfE. (www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/208682/Teachers__Standards_2013.pdf)

Hughes, T. (1970) ’Myth and Education’. Children’s Literature in Education, 1 (1): 55—70. A key article by a significant children’s author giving his own views about the meaning of his story The Iron Man.

Sanger, K. (1998) The Language of Fiction. London: Routledge. Sanger explores a great many issues about the relationship between a writer, a text and a reader. He is particularly good on the way characters are constructed and interpreted with a special consideration given to uses of description and dialogue.