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Watching from the shadows : transactional relations between intermediate readers and a polyfocal novel : a case study

University of British Columbia

This case study used an interdisciplinary research design to compare text-favored and reader-identified focalization for a multiperspectival children's novel. Focalization replaces the concept narrative point of view and refers to a two-part perceptual relationship in literary fictions (Rimmon-Kenan, 2002). One sixth-grade class from a K-12 school in a major Western Canadian city participated in this study. These 18 sixth-graders listened to the novel Salt River Times (Mayne, 1980) read aloud to them and completed a four-part written response set for selected chapters. Systemic-functional linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) was used to determine text- and reader-based focalization for focal text and participant response data. The study showed that reader-text relations for the polyfocal novel Salt River Times were narratororiented, an external (detached) orientation in a transactional model that restates Rosenblatt's (1978) transactional theory of reading in terms of a frame of narrative transaction (Stephens, 1992) and a typology of focalization (Rimmon-Kenan, 2002). Participant response data which included the verbal reports of focal participants did not support the conclusion that readers imaginatively became identified character-focalizers in intimate (participatory) transactional relations. A side finding in this study was that participants did engage with a polyfocal novel in terms of aesthetic response, the findings of two previous studies of unidentified polyfocal novels (Gustavson, 2000; Enciso, 1992). The present study points to the need for further research on the effects of polyfocalization to show whether readers benefit from specific instructional strategies that would help them identify polyfocalization.

Text

2009-12-15

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/16665

Literacy Education

University of British Columbia

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