In this paper, we demonstrate the relationship between reading and writing for pleasure. Children read a wide range of media as well as books for pleasure and develop strong affective bonds with the artefacts of literacy they encounter. What remains less well understood is the relationship between the array of texts children engage with and the texts they subsequently create. A focus on “Reading for Pleasure” has enabled us to think anew about the relationships between the texts children read, play and engage with and those they make, play and tell. Data from two doctoral research projects illuminate the ways children draw on cultural resources, moving skilfully across mode, medium and form. In doing so, they learn language conventions which enable them to engage in schooled literacies and learn to use conventional language techniques for their own purposes to transform and re‐imagine texts. Children's identities as readers, writers and storytellers are constructed holistically, and we explore the role of pleasure in reading and meaning making. In conclusion, we consider the potential for positioning reading for pleasure not in isolation, but as a strand in the complex fabric of literacy that needs to be nurtured in children.
The extent to which children's reading experiences influence their writing production is not well understood. It is imperative that the connections between these literacy practices are elucidated in order to inform the development of stimulating curricula and to support children's development. This paper presents new data and key findings from a project investigating relationships between children's free choice reading and volitional writing in Key Stage 2 (9–10 years). The data were collected in two primary schools in northern England, using mixed methods. Quantitative data were collected using an online reading survey taken by 170 children, and qualitative data were provided through independent writing journals maintained by 38 participants. Through analysis of the data using a multiliteracies approach, we demonstrate that the writing that children choose to do is influenced by the texts they encounter as readers in terms of content, text type and linguistic style. The child readers in this project encountered texts in different media and created texts in a range of genres. By examining a sample of children's written texts from the data set, we show that children's interactions and transactions with texts as readers and writers are complex and multiple. Children creatively work across media, and in doing so the boundaries of traditional text genres and styles are redeveloped and redesigned. These findings highlight the importance of providing children with opportunities to freely choose and create texts and recognising the wide variety of text experiences that children bring to their classroom learning.
This article utilises the term 'digital authoring' in order to explore the ways in which children create multi-modal, digital media texts. Drawing on the notion of 'emergent literacy' we share vignettes from different pedagogical and research contexts where children use media to tell stories in different forms with different technologies. These accounts demonstrate the value to children of opportunities to make volitional choices about the mode, media and form of their own texts. We reflect on moments of authoring in our vignettes which provide insights into the intrinsic pedagogic affordances of cultural practices such as vlogging and video diaries situated as they are, in wider socio-cultural practices. In doing so, we draw on the notion of 'playful tinkering' as a key pedagogical approach which recognises the value of children's volitional engagements with digital media, to their emerging skills and dispositions as authors of digital media texts. Generations of children have grown up reading film, television and videogame textsand in recent years we have come to know more about how young children learn to read complex moving image media (Bazalgette, 2018). For example, to understand a film, children have to develop an awareness of continuity editing, so that they recognise that time has passed or a journey has been taken. They learn to read the cues for this, such as a cut or a fade, through repeated watching of favourite media, just as they learn how language can shift us forwards and back in time and how images can use perspective to indicate a pathway. Children engage simultaneously with multiple modes (Burn, 2017) such as sound and image in order to make meaning from the media they engage with. However, the means by which children learn to use their knowledge of the signification systems of the different modes in the texts they make, is less well understood, particularly outside formal learning contexts. Until recently the possibility for young children to create film or even still images as an everyday literacy practice has been limited. However, due to the increased capabilities of
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