When: 2 October 2013 15.30-17.30 Where: Spiegelzaal, Grote Gracht 80-82
Emergent Cultural Literacy: Assimilating Children’s Literature
Why Bother Combining Hermeneutical and Empirical Methods in Children’s Literature Research? Lies Wesseling, Annette de Bruijn and Inge Verouden.
This FASoS Colloquium features the Emergent Cultural Literacy research project which combines hermeneutical and empirical methods in studying young Dutch children’s assimilation of children’s literature as an essential part of their emergent cultural literacy. But why bother with studying children’s responses to literature, given the laborious, intricate process of entering into the classroom? Much has been written about the types of texts children can cope with at a certain age, about the benefits of reading and about the importance of reading pleasure. When it comes to why and how certain texts and genres are actually understood, appreciated and remembered by young children, however, we are always up against a dearth of reception data.
Moreover, children’s assimilation and appreciation of literature strongly depend on the pragmatic context in which they make their first acquaintance with literary texts: they need to be able to do things with texts, which compels us to observe child readers in action. In this colloquium we will present our research questions, methodology and some empirical results of a pilot executed at the beginning of 2013.
