Children’s Literature: Techniques for Reading and Comprehension

Posted on Feb 26, 2025 in Other civil servant exams

Children’s Literature in English: Reading and Comprehension Techniques

Reading or listening to literary texts is a communicative activity through which attitudes, values, and socio-cultural aspects are transmitted. Materials such as stories, poems, and rhymes are valuable teaching aids that will help students attain communicative competence. Teachers should use literary texts in the English class because they present language in context, provide authentic language, and are motivating. Teachers have to design activities to initiate and motivate reading habits, one of the objectives established by the current educational law.

Children’s Literature in English

Characteristics and Functions of Literary Texts

A. Tales:

They present the following features:

  • The vocabulary and structures are contextualized.
  • Natural repetition of words and structures.
  • Simple grammatical structures.
  • It is easy to predict what follows.

The use of stories in the English class has:

  • Psychological functions: Stories help children solve their effective conflicts, develop children’s imagination and creativity, and develop social integration in the class.
  • Didactic functions: Stories develop positive attitudes towards the foreign language, encourage unconscious learning of the language, develop receptive skills, provide the starting point for a variety of follow-up activities, and provide an insight into socio-cultural aspects.

B. Verse: Nursery Rhymes, Riddles, and Limericks:

Characteristics:

  • Nursery rhymes are short.
  • They have a marked rhythm and musicality.
  • They can be accompanied by actions (total physical response).
  • The reduced vocabulary makes them easy to learn.
  • They improve the pronunciation of English.
  • They increase the student’s vocabulary and new expressions.
  • They bring variety and fun to the English class, creating a pleasant atmosphere.
  • In the case of riddles, the children have to think about what is being described.
  • Limericks are humorous rhymes that have their origin in holiday parties.

Children’s Literature in Great Britain

Great Britain is considered to be a branch of great literature. One of the first authors who thought of writing books for children was Caxton with “Reynard the Fox” in the 15th century. In the 16th century, small books for children “chapbooks” began to be printed, tales collected from oral tradition. In the 17th century, literature at that time was inspired by moral puritan principles; this was called divine literature. In the 18th century, John Locke had the idea of learning through game. English literature entered the modern age in the 18th century with new plots and ideas. One of them was that every human being was an individual. So the common man is the protagonist: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. At the end of the 18th century, Ann and Jane Taylor wrote Original Poems for Infant Minds. The utilitarian atmosphere of the 19th century, together with religion, provoked a shift of taste regarding children’s literature. There were writers like Charles Dickens with the book “The victim child”, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear wrote nonsense literature. Lewis Carroll wrote “Alice in Wonderland”, “Treasure Island” written by Robert Louis Stevenson and “The Jungle Book” written by Rudyard Kipling were adventure novels. On the other hand, Oscar Wilde wrote “The Happy Prince” and “The Selfish Giant” as an aesthetic movement. The 20th century was a period of full development of children’s literature. J.M. Barrie wrote “Peter Pan”, Beatrix Potter wrote “Peter Rabbit”, A.A. Milne wrote “Winnie the Pooh”, Kenneth Grahame wrote “The Wind in the Willows”, Pamela Travers wrote “Mary Poppins”, Roald Dahl wrote “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and J.K. Rowling is the author of the “Harry Potter” novels. In the 21st century, Eoin Colfer published “Artemis Fowl”.

Children’s Literature in the U.S.A.

In the USA, the history of the country is reflected in children’s books. In the 19th century: Harriet Beecher wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. Louisa May Alcott wrote “Little Women”. Mark Twain wrote “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn”. In the 20th century: Lyman Frank Baum wrote “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” and Elwyn Brooks White wrote “Stuart Little”.

Techniques for Oral Comprehension and Reading Habits

Criteria for Selecting Literary Texts

The teacher must be careful when selecting the texts he is going to use for teaching purposes. Here are several factors to take into consideration: Student’s age, level of vocabulary, structures and functions, the subject, the use of visuals, the language content, the potential for follow-up activities: role-plays, written exercises, webpages to practice and reinforce vocabulary, pronunciation and structures in a meaningful way.

Oral Comprehension Techniques: Learning to Listen

We should train the learner’s ear to understand stories and texts in English. We should train them in: Recognizing sounds, identifying the main idea, extracting specific information, predicting what they are going to listen to and storing information in the memory to know how to retrieve it later. If we want our students to be efficient listeners in English, we must give them enough practice in both intensive and extensive learning.

Intensive learning: It requires a specific search of sounds, words or facts within a context. Teachers should provide children with ear-training activities, finding differences, completion-type activities and identifying words in a text.

Extensive listening: They are activities for global understanding such as listening to stories. Teachers must build up the children’s confidence by telling them that it is not a problem not to understand every single word. Here is a guide for approaching storytelling:

  • Pre-listening stage: It includes activities to arouse children’s curiosity and expectations such as identifying elements in pictures, deducing from observation or predicting what they are going to listen to.
  • While-listening stage: The students are now ready to listen to the story, so the teacher can play the story on a CD or read it out.
  • Post-listening stage: These are follow-up activities that consolidate the language presented in the story. Activities such as: mime the story, describing characters, role-play, pronunciation practice, sequencing the pictures of the story, dictation of words, drawings or handicrafts.

Initiating and Increasing Reading Habits

Primary teachers will have to encourage the development of reading habits by teaching efficient reading techniques. Our aim should be to train students to read fluently in English for their own enjoyment. Reading in English in the early stages remains at the word or simple structure level, with visual information. Useful activities are: spelling and word-recognition activities, associating the visual form with the word or games as Bingo or Snap. After students practice word-recognition activities, we can ask the students to search for detailed or specific information through intensive reading techniques: recognizing key words, associating meanings, scanning, reading comprehension questions. Or we can ask the students to cope with long texts without worrying about understanding every unknown word through extensive reading techniques: general impression, suggesting a title for the text, matching titles to short texts, giving an opinion, answering questions or deducing unknown words.

The procedure in a reading comprehension lesson should be:

  • Pre-reading stage: motivating the students by relating to their personal experience or activities such as predicting information by looking at the pictures, identifying the topic of the text.
  • While-reading stage: students concentrate on reading or skimming.
  • After-reading stage: These activities are usually integrated with other skills: summarizing, discussion, crossword, role-play, drawing.

Encouraging reading habits: Reading should be an enjoyable task. The most obvious way of directing students’ attention is to have a set of adapted books of different levels available for borrowing and setting a book corner in the classroom.

Becoming Attuned to the Poetic Function

How to introduce our students to the appreciation of poetic language? Nursery rhythm is the first stylistic feature children will notice. So teachers can explain the key words, the cultural background (pre-listening stage), then children can listen to the rhythm or clap as they say the rhythm (listening stage) and finally, children imitate verse by verse all together, in groups or one by one (Production stage). After that, children are familiar with the rhyme. So teachers can make the students think of words that rhyme with others or children can invent new verses. Once the rhyme has been learnt, the teacher can explain the semantic effect, the figures to be studied will depend on the children’s age.

Conclusion

In this unit we have reviewed the most suitable literary genres to use in the English class. The teacher will have to decide on the type of text to use, according to criteria such as students’ age and interests, and the linguistic and cultural potential of the text. Literary texts offer a source of teaching possibilities, since language is presented in a meaningful and attractive context. If a teacher selects an appropriate text and plans its exploitation carefully, he/she will be developing the students’ communicative competence, as purposeful receptive and productive skills are being developed.

Bibliography

The bibliography used to develop this unit includes: ANDERSON, L W, & KRATHWOHL D R (eds.) (2001). Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. New York: Longman. /BREWSTER, J. ELLIS, G. and GIRARD, D. (2002). The Primary English Teacher’s Guide, New Edition. Pearson Education Limited, Essex, U.K../BYRNE, D. (1997). Teaching oral English. England, UK: Longman. /COUNCIL OF EUROPE. (2003).Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment. United Kingdom, U.K: Cambridge University Press./GARDNER, H. (2001): Reformulated Intelligence. Multiple Intelligences in XXI Century. Buenos Aires: Paidós. /HARMER, J. The Practice of English Language Teaching. London: Longman, 2008 (4th ed.)./NUNAN, D. (2010): Language Teaching Methodology. Anaheim University Press.

As to the Legal framework I will take into account the Decree 89/2014, of the 24th of July, which establishes the curriculum for Primary in Madrid. / LOE (Organic Law of Education), 2/ 2006 of the 3rd of May. / Organic Law for the Improvement in Educational Quality 8/2013, 9th December, LOMCE (BOE 10/12/2013)./ Royal Decree 126/2014, 28th February, by which the Basic Curriculum of Primary Education is established.

Moreover, I will include the research into some webpages such as http://dictionary.cambridge.org/, http://www.learningkids.com, http://bbc.co.uk/