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  • Storytime: Young Children's Literary Understanding in the Classroom
  • Nancy Roser (bio)
Storytime: Young Children's Literary Understanding in the Classroom. By Lawrence R. Sipe, foreword by P. David Pearson. New York: Teachers College Press, 2008.

Storytime: Young Children's Literary Understanding in the Classroom offers an insider's perspective on how teachers and young children in kindergarten through second grade work together to make literary sense of "well-wrought" (138) picture books. Lawrence Sipe, a professor of children's literature and a former elementary teacher, draws from twelve years of naturalistic studies of classroom conversations to articulate a grounded theory of children's literary understanding. Storytime is addressed to an audience seeking "a broad theoretical framework with which to understand, interpret, and conceptualize young children's rich and varied responses to literature" (9). That audience will not be disappointed.

The content is organized into three sections that move the reader from consideration of the potential of picture books for literary meaning making, through the rich discourse that gives testimony to meaning making in primary classrooms, toward implications for teaching and further research. Useful appendices contextualize Sipe's original classroom studies and offer a glossary of specialized terms.

Sipe defines the picture book as the text form in which pictures, words, and peritext (for example, cover, endpapers, title page) work together to tell a visual story (14). Part 1 argues for a semiotic theoretical perspective on picture books, contending that the illustrational sequence and design features are but two of "the multiplicity of signs" (16) that reveal one another in visual aesthetic texts. Through precise descriptions that slow the interior eye, Sipe points out critical features of illustration that children lean on (with and without help) in their sense-making forays. In fact, his descriptions of illustrations are so precise that it is possible not just to recall the familiar but to visualize the unfamiliar—necessary for a book that, like Nodelman's Words about Pictures, contains no illustrations at all. To navigate picture books for their contributions to meaning, Sipe argues, is to "pay attention" (15). His systematic exposition of critical features [End Page 221] of picture books helps to develop that attention in a style that is both academic and accessible.

For Sipe, children's literary meaning making can be situated within a Vygotskian social constructivist frame. From that position, he argues for the importance of language in social settings to children's cognitive development (37). Then, rightfully assuming that many of us who work directly with children and teachers know too little about literary theory, Sipe provides brief introductions both to text-based and reader-based theorists who have helped explain adults' reading (Richards, Fish, Rosenblatt, Britton, Bleich, Bogdan, and others), positioning the theories on a continuum in relation to the autonomy of the reader in each. His assumptions (derived from theory and research) are that children as active meaning makers are nested within the scaffolding presence of teachers, the leveraging power of peers, and the invitational spells of well-chosen books.

Sipe describes Part 2 as "the core of the book" (9), displaying evidence of what children can accomplish in the presence of fine teachers who make room for talk during storytime. Just as the first section may particularly strengthen the knowledge base of elementary teachers, the second may inform scholars who have had fewer opportunities to observe or work directly with children talking over books. Here, the child participants from Sipe's studies gain substance and voice, demonstrating their insights in selected excerpts from transcripts drawn from conversations on the story rug.

From analysis of the discourse, Sipe constructs a five-point conceptual categorization system to describe children's responses to picture books as being primarily (a) analytical, (b) intertextual, (c) personal, (d) transparent, or (e) performative. The "analytic" category broadly subsumes children's talk of text structures and meanings, format features, narrative elements, references to the book as a crafted object, and more. The intertextual category collects conversational turns that relate the focus of the picture book to other texts and products. Personal responses are those in which the children connect their own experiences to or from the text. Sipe deftly defends...

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