Figure 3.1 shows the early writing of a 4-year-old girl. It is possible to discern attempts at writing LOVE, and, given that I know the context, I am fairly certain that there is an attempt to write LOLA, the name of her friend. The sign that interests me is the sign in the bottom left-hand corner. The child had asked me to write thank you for her, so that she could write it herself on a card for her friend. My hastily—and as it turns out, thoughtlessly written, thank you is produced here. The child took that away, and then returned excitedly, saying ‘Look, I’ve done it’
What is it that she had done? She had looked at the parent’s sign, and had attempted to analyse it, to make sense of it: clearly there were a number of elements here, so one task was to identify these elements. How do you identify elements? It seems that you work, first, on the assumption that there is a logic in the making of signs, and that that logic broadly is that of the motivated relation between meaning and form. The ‘meaning’ in this case is ‘integral element’, and the formal means of expression of that meaning is, she assumed, that things which are closely connected are part of one integral element. Hence her elation at producing the novel letter/unit that she produced. The second assumption, therefore, is that formal organization (in this case, the
connectedness of lines) mirrors the organization of meaning (in this case the coherence of the elements).
Both these principles are, I believe, correct, and are correctly applied by this child. The problem in this case was the parent’s lack of attention to this reader’s situation. That is, the parent did not consider the child-reader’s position in making this sign: for instance, the fact that she did not at that stage know letter-shapes, and could not know the principles of ‘joined-up writing’. I would certainly complain if I had asked someone to teach me Arabic script and that person proceeded as I had done here. Having once undertaken that task I am aware how one attributes meaning to every squiggle, every line, many of which may be entirely marginal for the practised writer. This sort of inattention is a mistake which is entirely common, but one for which the child is of course not to be held responsible.
The parent’s attention was focused on a unit of a different kind, a different size: the phrase thank you, and not on the units which the child was focused on, the elements/letters which make up that phrase. For the parent thank you exists as a single unit, or at least does so unless some good reason exists for that not to be the case. In other words, for both parent and child, writer and reader, the logic and the principles were right; but each was applying the right logic and principles to different types of units, to differently sized units, and to units of a different kind. The child was applying the principles to the unit ‘letters’, and the adult was applying them to the unit ‘phrase’. That of course is an entirely Figure 3.1 Thank you’
usual situation in writing and reading, at least in part captured by exhortations such as: ‘Keep the needs of your audience in mind.’
Nevertheless, even in this slight example, we can see the large theoretical conflicts in reading theory: between proponents of a view of reading as establishing correspondence between letter and sound (in this instance, that is close to the child’s position), and those who see reading as making sense of larger level units, ‘whole units of language’. My example illustrates that both are right, both are needed, though at different times, and for different purposes. Parent and child, as much as the two distinct theories, are focused on objects of quite different kind.
Before I restate the principles so far established, let me draw attention to a further issue brought up clearly by this example. Whatever it is that the child did in reading (and then reproducing) the letters in the parent’s model, it was not mere copying. That would have led to a reproduction of all the joined elements in that initial sequence, the capital T and H joined together; nor is her new ‘letter’ an exact copy even of that part of the model which it draws on most—the cross-bar on the T in the model is not copied in the child’s letter. The activity is not one of ‘copying’ in any sense (for instance, ‘acquiring’, as in ‘language acquisition’). The action is one of perception, and then of transformation—the making of a new sign. I will return to this point in more detail in the next chapter; though even here we can see ‘experimentation’, transformation, with the letter E, for instance. The fact that the child’s new letter TH will not survive for long (though the various forms of E persist for quite some time) is, from this point of view, beside the point.
The principles for reading established so far are these:
1 Things which are closely connected in form (and/or materially) are connected in meaning: formal/material connectedness ‘means’ coherence in meaning.
2 Formal/material organization mirrors the organization of meaning—that is, form is a good guide, the best guide to meaning available. Both of these exist within the overarching principle of (1).
3 Signs are produced out of the sign-maker’s interest, as an expression of that interest. What the child reads and then expresses as a new sign is not, therefore, some abstractly or generally inherent characteristic of a text or of some object, but of those features which the child-reader considers as criterial at that moment.
In considering the next few examples I will focus on this aspect: what is it that the child reader seems to have seen as the criterial aspects or features of the text or object that was read?
To start with a relatively simple example (Figure 3.2). The child (3 years and 3 months old) said, when he had drawn the picture on the right of Figure 3.2: ‘That’s a ghost’ As we had quite recently looked at and read him the book Scary Story Night, the figure on the left (a traced version of the ghost-figure early in the story) may have served as the model—though as a clichéd version of ghost drawings it is pretty well ubiquitous in drawings for children. The replicated figure suggests that the features which the child regarded as criterial were the overall shape of the figure of the ghost, and a reproduction of the protruding eyes. Whether the pointed bottom of the child’s ghost figure was a deliberate or an accidental feature is impossible to establish; though intent has to be kept as a possibility here; as perhaps it does in the case of the backward-leaning angle of the figure, which is also a feature of the original. The ‘eyes’, if that is what they are, have become more central in the child’s drawing, so that their visual salience through blackness in the original may here be being signalled by centrality as an indicator of salience.
These are the features which can give an indication of the child’s interest in his reading of this (part of the) text: this is what seems most prominent about ghostness—or, at any rate, that is how he has transformed the idea of ‘ghost’ for himself. In this Figure 3.2 Ghosts
Source: Rob Lewis, Scary Story Night, Hemel Hempstead: Simon &
example, a relatively early instance in this child’s figurative/ representative drawing, there is of course the question of his representational abilities: he is able to do certain kinds of things— for instance to produce circular shapes (witness the example of the ‘car’ in Chapter 1, Figure 1.1) with certain additional features. There are no doubt real limitations on what he can do; though it needs to be said that that applies to all makers of all representations—adult or child, amateur or professional.
In the next example, Figure 3.3, the interest is different—it arises from the children’s own concerns, and as a response to the kind of text being read. Here the children are reproducing an icon from the cover of a CD of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. The three representations on the left are made by a 6½-year-old; the one on the right by his sister, then 4 years and 3 months old. The 6-year- old produced a whole series of these designs, all of them documenting his interest in this shape; as does his sister’s reproduction. However, while her interest seems to be with the basic shape, his goes beyond that to wider aspects of ‘design’— how to represent the three-dimensional appearance of the original, how to represent the twisting tube effect of the model; and how to use shading to produce effect. His interests are wider, and perhaps more intense: she may have produced her representation in a relatively casual fashion, doing it only because it interested her brother.
In Figure 3.4 there is also a contrast of interest. Figure 3.4a is drawn by a 6½-year-old, about a month before Tubular Bells.Figure 3.4b is drawn by his sister, at the age of 3 years and 10 months, but this time, on quite separate occasions, with no influence by one child on the other. Over two days the 6-year-old drew a series of hedgehogs, and in each case it seemed to be the basic shape which was of most interest to him. He drew the shape first; in some cases, as here, he then filled it in with spikes; in others he drew the shape, indicated a snout and eyes; indicated legs and a tail in some cases, not in others; and left the drawings at that. Clearly the shape as such interested him most, though the spikes were clearly of interest too. Some of the shapes are Figure 3.4 Hedgehog (a) and Bad Hedgehog (b)
more elongated, others more rounded and dumpy. As far as the spikes are concerned, the drawing gives the impression (and the evidence here is length of stroke; directionality, from left to right, slightly curved) of interest in the technical aspects of doing them. They seem executed, in all the instances I have, with great exuberance.
His sister’s hedgehogs (she did two: a ‘good hedgehog’ and a ‘bad hedgehog’, the latter is shown here) made when she was 3 years and 10 months old, focus not so much on shape, but on the furry, spikey, spiney characteristics of this ball-animal. Shape is discernible—a kind of slightly distorted semicircular blob, like half an orange squashed out of shape; but that shape is established as an effect of the drawing of the spikeyness and furryness of this creature. Both children are aware of shape. For the 5-year-old, shape as an abstracted notion is prior, the centre of his interest; spikes are then indicated, in forceful, energetic, yet also intensely abstracted, strokes. What is represented is an abstracted, indicated spikeyness. For the 3-year-old the tactile characteristics of the hedgehog are prior, the centre of her interest; shape emerges as an effect of the concentration on representing these tactile characteristics, it is immanent in the object as a whole. The difference between bad and good hedgehog seems to be indicated mainly by the colour scheme: deep blues, pinks, yellow, green, orange for the bad hedgehog; and a light orangey-brown with a very little green for the good hedgehog. The bad hedgehog is drawn with larger, bolder, more energetic strokes than the good one.
It seems clear to me that there are distinctly different interests at work here: the tendency towards the abstraction of shape as against the interest in (the representation of) tactile characteristics; the exploration of aspects of design in the case of Figure 3.2, as against a relatively marginal interest (on this occasion) in basic shapes. The questions raised by this involve issues such as ‘development’, and gendered interests, among others, and I will discuss these later. However, while I draw attention to the possible limitations of ‘ability’ in the case of the ‘ghost’ (Figure 3.2) I am most reluctant to make too much of that factor; for one thing it is too readily used as a means of dismissing, ignoring, overlooking the real representational abilities of children at all ages. The child who drew the bad hedgehog at 3 years and 3 months is the child who drew the model of the skeleton of the Tyrannosaurus rex (Figure 4.7) some three months earlier. The powers of concentration, the control, the attention displayed in that drawing are such as to make me unwilling to talk too much about lack of ability.
Although I promised to confine myself in this chapter to the reading of two-dimensional objects and texts, I do wish, briefly, to stray into the readings of films and videos. Among the drawings and paintings in ‘my collection’ there are some made as a response to the watching of a film or of a video at home. There is, for instance, a fine drawing done in coloured pens of the ‘King’s servant’, a bird from the film Lion King. It was done when the child came back in the afternoon from watching the film. It is magnificently coloured and though I haven’t seen the film myself, I imagine that it must be an impressive character in the film. I am interested in two things in particular: how can one, or how does a child-viewer, condense the meaning of a whole film into an image? Second, I am interested in the fact that the signs produced as a result of reading a film tend to be poster-like displays. Whether the child is here reproducing either the genre of ‘cover’ on the video tape, or the advertising poster of the film, I am not sure. In any case, what is produced tends to lead the child to design a display which covers all the space available, that is, a whole page.
The image reproduced in Plate 5 was made after seeing the film Jurassic Park. The then 6-year-old designer produced the ‘poster’ without prompting. It shows a diplodocus poking its head up from the bottom of the frame, a stegosaurus walking across the middle background, somewhat higher up, in front of a rainbow and some tropical plants. The task here facing the child is to condense the meaning of the film, to produce his sign of the film (his sister who saw the film at the same time and who was less scared by the variously frightening scenes did not produce any images as a result of seeing the film) from the point of view of his interest. But the task is also, it seems, to produce a design which fully and satisfactorily uses the space which the page makes available.
To me this seems particularly interesting, in relation to the learning of writing, as indeed in a much more general way. Writing demands a range of skills to do with display, spatial design, spatial orientation, and so on, nearly all of which go unrecognized in discussions of the learning of writing. The significance of the page as a (visual) unit in written texts as much as in overtly visual texts is hardly discussed, but it is of fundamental importance for full control of writing. Consequently, the knowledge gained in the making of images of this kind cannot be overestimated. This is so for writing in its conventional sense, but it is vastly more important as visual forms of communication are becoming a central feature of the communicational landscape, where written language is already playing a far less central role than it did even twenty years ago. As texts draw more and more overtly on visual
means of communication, the skills and knowledges of visual design and display will need to be fostered as a central part of any literacy curriculum.
To summarize briefly at this point: reading is the making of signs, ‘internally’. The reader takes the form of the text (including highly complex texts such as films) as guides to the meanings of the maker of the sign; form mirrors meaning, form and meaning are entirely connected, one as the expression of the other. These are principles employed by readers in their making sense of the world of meaning. Reading is not simply the assimilation of meaning, the absorption or acquisition of meaning as the result of a straightforward act of decoding. Reading is a transformative action, in which the reader makes sense of the signs provided to her or to him within a frame of reference of their own experience, and guided by their interest at the point of reading. The transformative action of internal sign-making in reading is shaped by the sign that is read, but is not determined by it. The boundaries to the act of reading/transformation, to the making of new, further internal signs are set by readers, out of their interest. The transformative action of reading includes the processes of abstraction and condensation. Lastly, the question of what is taken as a sign to be read is also largely under the control of the readers, guided by their interest.