Five-year-olds' recognition of authorship by literary style
Georgia M. Green, Margaret O. Laff · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 1980
In a pilot study, 13 kindergarteners were briefly exposed in a naturalistic setting to 2 works by each of 5 childrens' authors.When they listened to tapes of a third work by each of the 5 authors, 6 of the children were able to correctly identify the authorship of 3 or more of the 5 stories.The other 7 children identified one or fewer correctly (3 of these did not complete the task). Five-Year-Olds' Recognition of Authorship by Literary StyleAn experiment designed to determine whether kindergarteners could recognize the authorship of a piece of prose by the style of the writing was undertaken as a pilot for a larger-scale experiment with slightly older children.The hypothesis was that at the age when reading instruction typically begins, children are capable of appreciating stylistic properties of text (syntactic, rhetorical, metrical, and lexical) that are almost universally edited out of instructional materials.Trade books designated for this age group do not suffer nearly so much from this flaw as basal readers do, but few contain the range of linguistic and rhetorical structures that characterize the variety of styles available in so-called 2 picture books designed to be read to 3-to 7-year-olds.Rather, owing to the strict constraints imposed by the publishers of basal readers on sentence length, vocabulary, and story length, these works have to be designed in such a way that they are devoid of most characteristics of individual style.If it can be shown that children attend to and appreciate stylistic differences, then it would seem to follow that expecting them to read such basal readers is, to say the least, inconsiderate.At best it is pointless, at worst it is counterproductive.Is it possible that Johnny doesn't learn to read because there is no thrill in being able to read: Rabbit said, "I can run.I can run fast.You can't run, Turtle.No.