Children and Adolescent Developmental Responses to Literature
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Children seek pleasure from a story, but are limited by their physical, cognitive, and affective development. This development is connected to their life experiences and emotional feelings they bring to a story. These will interact with other variables as students read, view, or listen to literature; creating a unique transaction between him or her and the story in a literary piece. Their personal developmental level limits or extends their depth of understanding of their transaction with literatue.
As mentioned at another link ( Responses to Literature ) response may be immediate, deferred, internal, and/or external and emotional, interpretive, or evaluative as well as at different levels of involvement. To better understand and predict students' responses to literature and facilitate their greater understanding, interpretation, and evaluation of literature it is helpful to study the development of different literary ideas across the ages of children and compare them to different developmental theories.
Student responses with respect to age and development
A child's first response to literature is usually a request for more.
A child's development to tell stories begins with a response of retelling a story beginning with a restatement of words, then phrases, and eventually a literal retelling of the story. All of a these responses can be sprinkled with short interpretive responses (laughter, smile, or descriptive words or phrases).
Later interpretive responses are added to the retelling narration (when I was..., I had a dog that...) where children interpret the story and relate it to similar personal experiences they have had. With practice the responses become a more comprehensive personal retelling of the story with emotional, interpretive, and evaluative responses.
In the elementary school these emotional and interpretive responses are critical as they allow readers to enter into a story and make it their own. Resulting in better evaluative responses through increased comprehension (literal, inference, and evaluation), and appreciation.
Expression of ideas: Small children have problems stating themes of stories. We should realize, however, that although a small child cannot define "home" or "mother" they know what the concept is. Security, love, comfort, warmth, protection, honesty, are abstractions they may know but are unable to articulate. For children, knowing and saying are rarely the same.
Vocabulary: The better the reader's / listener's / watcher's understanding of vocabulary used in the literature and to describe literature pieces the more significant the involvement and the better they are able to communicate a response.
Attention span: The better the reader's / listener's / watcher's attention span is maintained during the story the greater the involvement.
Amount of digression: Increased digression in the literary piece decreases involvement.
Relationships of character and actions:
- Young children are limited in their awareness of alternatives.
- Young children can be prevented by their elders from making discoveries on their own and developing alternatives when they are told what to do or have things done for them.
- Children rarely see motives for behavior beyond what they would like to see.
- Children see choices as black and white, they are unaware of their own mixed motives, and rarely see those of others.
Social character development Social skills and understanding is learned through interactions with people. Children with limited social experiences are not be able to understand social character development.
Amount of action and order of action: Students’ memories are limited in the number of events they can remember that occur at the same time. Even adults are limited to about seven ideas at a time. Students can remember more if the ideas are told sequentially and chained together in some manner. Flashbacks are confusing to children who have not developed a fairly sophisticated concept of time (remember your first experience with them?).
Children are more literal than adults: Fred Gwyn'e Moose, Amelia Badelia
Responses improve with cognitive and affective growth and development
Using developmental theories to predict and understand children's responses to literature
Understanding what and how children think can help understand how they respond to literature. Therefore, theories of child development that suggest how children grow and develop socially, cognitively, morally, and physically can help to understand how they think and what their interests and needs are at different ages can be used to help guide our selection or to guide students' selection of literature.
Erikson's Theory of Psychosocial Development
Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development
Piaget's Theory of Development
Caring and Bibliotherapy as responses
Robert Sweetland's Notes ©