My grandmother saw the emperor cry the day he lost his golden dragon throne.

I had just begun reading out from The Lotus Seed by Sherry Garland to a group of 9- to 12-years-olds in our community library.

Before I turned the page, I instinctively looked up, and almost immediately one of the more senior girls decided to explain what had been read out, saying, ‘Daadi cried because the king was lost.’  I held my breath hoping someone else would qualify that with more understanding. But everyone looked at me as if to say, ‘Go on, turn the page, let’s see how the king was lost, or why daadi cried.’ This is probably common when  children are being read to, or are reading themselves, the children’s meaning-making comes into question with such comments.

Story read alouds are what children come to the library for, and they have been doing this for over six years. The children are motivated by the power of the story in spite of their struggles with school learning and literacy, pressures from tuition teachers, timings, challenges around water supply, arabi classes and evening prayer time. For two hours, three times a week, we all transport ourselves to worlds far removed from our own. And that’s how we got around to reading  The Lotus Seed.

I imagined that I had set the context for meaning-making fairly well. Before I began with the story, I had activated the children's prior knowledge about the setting (Vietnam and North America) through map work. We also had a brief discussion on reasons for people migrating.

Preparation for the read aloud also included some pre-vocabulary work. This is one way in which we engage non-English speakers into comprehending read alouds in English. But despite years of experience reading aloud to diverse groups, I missed introducing the symbolism of a ‘golden throne’ to the children. Many stories have the word ‘throne’, and I’d assumed that it was naturally symbolic of ‘rule’ rather than its literal meaning ‘seat’.

I’d also assumed the context would clue the children in.  I failed to recognise that in the story-spell they would likely only pick up the literal meanings of key vocabulary, and in doing that, would miss something significant. Without that point of reference, much of the story’s true meaning would be lost. The line meant that the king was defeated and that the kingdom would change hands.

Factors Influencing Text Selection

Readers vary in the skills, knowledge, cognitive development, culture, and purpose they bring to a text (Narvaez, 2002). While selecting a text to read aloud, I was affected by my world knowledge and assumptions. Despite every effort to enter the world of the audience that I know intimately, my reading mind missed something at the very start of the story.

So the journey of selecting appropriate books, and preparing to support children’s comprehension, is not simple. In the segments that follow, I attempt to address aspects of text selection and preparation that enable us to support comprehension in a language/ library room.

In a book shop, books may have tags to indicate age-appropriateness.  These are, perhaps, more problematic than we realise. Every publisher’s approach to grading texts is different. Their assumptions about how these books will be used are also varied (for example, will they be read aloud to the children, or will children be expected to read them independently?). Therefore, we cannot select books by age-appropriateness alone. So how do we approach selection of books keeping in mind children’s meaning-making process?

In the read-aloud sessions, our focus is more on listening comprehension than on individual reading comprehension. So decoding and fluency do not directly affect choice; however the nature and quality of the text (words and pictures) matter greatly.

We know a bundle of skills and knowledge domains must work together to support comprehension.

These skills include

• basic language ability
• decoding skills
• higher-level thinking skills

Knowledge includes

• Background knowledge. This refers to how a child connects her prior knowledge to the text being read. Prior knowledge might include knowledge about content, genre, vocabulary, context, and so on.
• Knowledge of strategies. Children also bring to the text knowledge of strategies that facilitate comprehension, such as, predicting, questioning, summarizing, and so on. This is discussed a little later.

Comprehension can be affected by factors such as:

• The age/developmental level of the child, which could cause them to understand texts in different ways. For example, it could impact their ability to make predictions, or to evaluate actions.
• The reader’s culture, based on the degree to which it matches with the writer’s culture or the culture represented in the text.
• The reader’s purpose for reading, for example – are they reading for pleasure or studying for an exam?
• The reader’s motivation – are they reading because they are forced to, or because they want to?
• Readers’ prior experience with encountering texts of various kinds might also impact their comprehension. It is well known that children who read more generally understand better.

All these need to be considered while selecting books for read aloud. The teacher should also understand that they would have read, re-read and re-re-read the book, before they select it for a read aloud.

The story must leave you (the teacher) with a feeling that there is something worth sharing in the book. It should be within the reach of the children, yet not too simplistic, so that it allows for think alouds, prediction and surprise. Once you find a story that you feel is worth sharing, and you have taken the cultural and developmental appropriateness into consideration, you can analyse it along these lines.

Surface features of the text

These are features like font type, letter size, the arrangement and layout of the text. You would also consider the length of the text and how it is organised –  how long and wordy the text is, and how strong the listening and language skills of the group are.

We have to be conscious of the layout because we are also building children’s understandings around print when we read aloud, with the book facing the children. This can be tricky if the book has small inserts with more information, or speech bubbles that must be called out during the story, or even text wandering through pictures!

Consideration of these aspects before the read aloud enables you to point them out to the children, and also build their understanding of such elements for future reading. Non-fiction texts can be packed with content, and have structures that demand more attention to layout and text organisation. Not considering these factors beforehand can lead to loss of meaning during the read aloud.

Deeper features of the text

Other than length, layout and organisation, you could also consider deeper features, such as, genre, vocabulary, and potential for higher-order, inferential meaning-making.

Genre: Is the book fiction, poetry, or non-fiction? Not taking the genre into account would definitely affect children’s meaning-making. For example, poetry may need different kinds of discussions to support comprehension, than a story or a piece about the social lives of ants.

Vocabulary: Are the words in the book ‘everyday’ words, or will some need to be explained? We need to be thoughtful about which words we pick for explanation. There is the danger of picking almost every word, which is an indication that the book is not appropriate for the group. Or there is the other danger of picking the most bombastic or unusual words that appear in the text, and spending time unpacking those. However, we need to weigh in on how critical those words are to the understanding the story.

Inferential meaning–making: To support children to understand the text beyond the literal meaning, we need to ask questions about what we can do to open up the text to more complex meaning-making. You now know I failed to attend to the ‘emperor’s dragon throne’ as a symbol in the story. That is the kind of language that must be be opened up before the story unfolds.

Comprehension Strategies

Comprehension occurs in the transaction between the text and the reader. For a read aloud, you are not only the medium in voicing the text, but also the teacher who makes explicit the strategies to enable meaning making. We draw deeply on what we know good readers do in the process of reading, and show children how to use these strategies. Thus, during the read aloud, we ensure use of strategies like monitoring, predicting, inferring, questioning, connecting, summarising, visualising, and organising; and we look for opportunities to model these strategies in the texts we select. Not every text is layered or extends itself to these more complex processes. Many are simply written with a focus on decoding and word practice, and tend to bore the listener and also frustrate the planning. Their simplistic nature does not allow you to explore the many dimensions of good reading strategies. Hence, it is important to choose rich, nuanced texts to support meaning-making.

Why I chose The Lotus Seed

I chose The Lotus Seed because it was a story that touched me. It is a story of loss and hope, and knowing my own life and that of my readers left me convinced that these aspects would resonate with the audience. There is a striking simplicity of presentation (arresting oil paintings on cream paper with sparse text) that make every page look like a painting. The migration is a recurring theme in the classrooms and libraries we work in. The context of the Vietnam War was an opportunity to bring in a history and culture we knew little of, and so provided an opportunity to expand the children’s world knowledge, and link this with other studies.

As I prepared for reading aloud The Lotus Seed, I noticed opportunities in the text structure that allowed me to raise questions, gain inferences and enable predictions before I turn the page, thus modelling good think-aloud strategies and recognising thoughtful book production and design. The language and story grammar had a plot that gripped the reader from the first line because emperors and crying are two variables that seem disconnected and so elicit wonder and curiosity from the word go. The story provides an opportunity for a discussion around morality when Ba’s grandson (the narrator’s younger brother) steals the lotus seed. Tatsuro Kiuchi’s illustrations have a complexity which bring the foreignness of the new country (in this case, New York) in an overhead perspective of skyscrapers and fast-moving traffic so well that the pictures truly show, without the words having to tell. The plot ends with a happy ending , but this is stuff we need to hear sometimes to keep going.

In transacting it with diverse readers and enabling space and time for expression and conversations, The Lotus Seed emerged as a core text that we returned to over and over again, despite the initial lapse in comprehension. Weeks later, it is still being referenced and recalled, as more knowledge around stories and the world are being fostered.

References

Garland Sherry, The Lotus Seed. Boston, Houghttom Mifflin Harcourt, 1993.

Narvaez, D. (2002). Individual differences that influence reading comprehension. In C.C. Block & M. Pressley (Eds.), New York: Guilford.

Tracey, D.H., & Morrow, L.M. (2002). Preparing young learners for successful reading comprehension. In C.C. Block & M. Pressley (Eds.), New York: Guilford.