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Faux Pas Test 0.62
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1
Spearman Rho;
p < .05;
p < .001.
was assessed by two raters blindly rating one third of the WPBR for
Narrative Competence. Intraclass correlations revealed interrater
agreement of (r = 0.74, F (1, 7) = 3.8, p < .05).
Results
Analyses were planned in ve phases. First we sought to deter-
mine the degree of association between the Eyes Test, Faux Pas
Test, and listening comprehension (LC) across the entire sample
of 34, that is, those receiving and those not receiving the interven-
tion. Here Spearman Rho coefcients were calculated, as not all
the data were expected to be normally distributed. As revealed in
Table 3, all measures were signicantly related to one another but
did not appear redundant. For example, the Eyes and Faux Pas
Tests, which were the most closely related tests, shared 31% of the
variance.
In our second analysis we examined whether children identi-
ed by their teachers as having both reading comprehension and
social difculties did in fact have less developed social imagina-
tion than peers without those same difculties. In order to reduce
the chances of spurious ndings, two tailed tests of signicance
were used despite having made unidirectional predictions. Sec-
ond, a MANOVA was conducted comparing the referred and con-
trol groups on the reading tasks and tasks of social imagination.
Third, an ANCOVA controlling for grade level was performed.
The analyses were done a third time, this time comparing groups
on the tasks of social imagination and controlling for the read-
ing task. As reported in Table 4, the socially challenged group did
less well on the Eyes, Faux Pas, and listening comprehension tests,
and differences on the Eyes Test and Faux Pas Test were found to
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548 J. T. Lysaker et al.
TABLE 4 MANOVA
1
Comparing Readers Who Were and Were Not Referred
for Difculties with Reading and Social Relating
Socially Not socially
and reading or reading
challenged challenged
(n = 22) (n = 12) F p
Listening comprehension 5.93 (1.16) 7.88 (1.54) 17.31 .0001
Eyes Test
2
13.41 (2.95) 18.83 (2.59) 19.75 .0001
Faux Pas Test
3
2.91 (2.02) 6.75 (1.14) 36.63 .0001
1
Wilks lambda F(3,29) = 18.01, p < .0001;
2
When analyses were repeated using com-
prehension as a covariate in an ANCOVA the groups remained signicantly different, F =
5.80, p < .05;
3
When analyses were repeated using comprehension as covariates.
persist even when performance on listening comprehension was
accounted for statistically.
The third set of analyses focused on whether performance of
social imagination on the Eyes Test, Faux Pas Test, and WPBR im-
proved frombaseline levels after 8 weeks of participation in RORI.
Here paired t-tests were conducted comparing baseline scores
with follow-up scores, as reported in Table 5. These revealed statis-
tically signicant improvements on the Eyes Test (T = 3.71), the
Faux Pas test (T = 8.55), and the number of instances of social
imagination in the wordless picture book reading (T = 3.82, p <
.001).
In the fourth set of analyses we turned to blind ratings of
comprehension based on the LC task and the wordless picture
book reading. Again we compared levels at baseline to levels af-
ter 8 weeks of intervention using paired t-tests. These revealed
increases in the number of instances of social imagination (T =
TABLE 5 Paired T-Tests on Assessments of Social Imagination
Time 1 Time 2
Test N Mean Score Mean Score T1 Sig.
Eyes Test 22 14.3 (3.0) 17.3 (3.0) 3.71
P < .001
Faux Pas 22 2.9 (2.0) 6.5 (2.2) 8.55
P < .001
WBR 2 17 7.29 (2.9) 10.3 (3.1) 3.82
P < .001
WBR 2 = Wordless book reading, frequency scoring.
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Reading and Social Imagination 549
TABLE 6 Paired T-Tests Assessments of Text Comprehension
Time 1 Time 2
Test N Mean Score Mean Score T1
LC 22 5.9 (1.2) 8.2 (1.0) 10.32
P < .001
NC 17 16.82 (5.2) 21.41 (6.1) 3.85
P < .002
LC = Listening comprehension, IRI.
NC = Narrative competence, wordless book reading.
10.32, p < .001) as well as the Narrative Competence (T = 3.85,
p < 002.) and are reported in Table 6.
Finally, analysis of the writing samples was conducted and
resulted in a preliminary typology of relationally oriented re-
sponse to literature. Like other typologies (Sipe, 2002), this ty-
pology describes a range of responses to literature within a par-
ticular conceptual framework. This typology consists of childrens
relationally oriented responses, from simple personal and emo-
tional response to a complex empathetic caring response charac-
terized by an understanding of the characters thinking and feel-
ing and envisagement of the changes needed to make life better
for the character. Types of responses present in childrens letter
writing as responses to the picture books were as follows: Per-
sonal/Emotional Response, Personal/Emotional Responses with
a Reason, Recognizing Emotions of Characters, Recognizing Emo-
tions of Characters with a Reason, Perspective Taking, Personal
Identication, Social imagination, and Caring (see Table 7).
Discussion
This study was conducted in two stages. First, correlates of social
and reading difculties in a group of referred versus nonreferred
readers were examined to explore the relationships between chil-
drens understanding of text and the capacity of social imagina-
tion. Second, changes in those variables following an intervention
were also examined. As expected, it was found that children re-
ferred to us because of difculties with reading comprehension
and getting along with others did less well on measures of social
imagination than peers without these struggles. As hypothesized,
when data were examined across the whole sample, children who
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Reading and Social Imagination 551
demonstrated less capacity for being able to imagine and under-
stand the feelings and thoughts of others as measured by the Eyes
and Faux Pas Tests did less well on assessments of listening com-
prehension and narrative competence. As children did better on
the Eyes Test and the Faux Pas Tests, they also did better on both
comprehension assessments. Additionally, as predicted, these dif-
ferences persist even when listening comprehension was con-
trolled for, suggesting the relative independence between these
variables. It is important here to remember that our measure of
text comprehension is not confounded by decoding. Because chil-
dren were not asked to decode text, the listening comprehension
score is indicative of the understanding of text alone rather than
the combination of decoding and understanding text.
In the second stage, which examined changes in assessments
over time, we found that children in the intervention improved
signicantly on measures of social imagination and comprehen-
sion after 8 weeks of RORI. Given the correlational nature of the
data, causal interpretations are not appropriate. However, if the
conceptual tenets articulated earlier in this article are sound, data
might be understood in particular ways. We offer the following
theoretical speculations about these results.
First, childrens development of social imagination over the
8-week period was striking. In both developmental standardized
assessments and informal literacy assessments, children demon-
strated greater understanding of other peoples thoughts, feel-
ings, and intentions after the 8-week intervention. Clearly, within
the RORI framework, children had many opportunities for think-
ing about the thoughts and feelings of other people. Group lead-
ers provided explicit demonstrations of this kind of relational ac-
tivity with text in the rst session of each week and provided many
opportunities for children to voice their own relationally oriented
responses in the second session.
One way to understand childrens increased ability to accu-
rately interpret the feelings of people as assessed by the Eyes Test
is to consider the use of illustrations in the RORI framework. Re-
call that as a part of each session, group leaders pointed out, re-
acted to, and asked questions about the thoughts and feelings of
the characters based on how those characters were depicted in
the illustrations. In addition, during instruction, group leaders
physically pointed to the characters faces when making their own
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552 J. T. Lysaker et al.
responses, as well as when requesting responses fromthe children.
During such interactions children were invited to share the group
leaders gaze as she looked at the character and demonstrated the
construction of a sensitive personal response through language.
From a dialogic perspective, the group leader is actively en-
gaged in a dialogue with the text both physically (eye gaze and
pointing) and in language. Her personal response is a demonstra-
tion for the children of what it looks like and what it sounds like
to bring oneself in relation to the text and to imagine (infer) what
a character might be feeling. If in fact our neural systems respond
to watching another by simulating within ourselves what the other
is doing and feeling, then we could speculate that the children
are also in some way experiencing something similar to that which
the group leader is demonstratingboth physically and through
languageprompted by the illustration of a characters face. This
is consistent with what we know about the role of demonstra-
tion in language learning (Camborne, 1995), as well as good
comprehension instruction in which teachers explicitly demon-
strate the ways in which readers can think about text (Block,
Gambrell, & Pressley, 2002).
Similarly, children seemed to improve in their awareness and
sensitivity to social situations as assessed by the Faux Pas Test.
This test asks children to make sense of awkward and poten-
tially hurtful social situations within stories. It seems reasonable
to think that picture book discussions focusing on relationships
might help children develop this capacity. Indeed, the picture
books used in this study all contained difcult social situations in
which characters reacted, made sense of, and eventually resolved
difcult social situations. Given our theoretical assumptions about
the role of the text as a relational context and the appropriation
of characters as self activity, it is interesting to consider the possi-
bility that these children did in fact develop greater relational ca-
pacity as they used their social imaginations to become the char-
acters. Using a dialogic frame to identify the mechanisms at work
in Rosenblatts reader/text transaction, we suggest that children
took up the identity of the characters as some aspects of them-
selves, which had the effect of developing their intimate knowl-
edge of others through the internalized comingling of the voices
of reader and text.
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Reading and Social Imagination 553
In addition to these two developmental standardized assess-
ments, the wordless picture book reading (WPBR) data also seem
to suggest that children as a group demonstrated greater so-
cial imagination. On the whole, childrens second wordless pic-
ture book readings included more frequent articulations of the
thoughts, feelings, and intentions of characters. From a dialogic
perspective, we speculate that RORI provided children with op-
portunities for actively taking up the perspectives of others in
the conversation between themselves and the text. This activity
of imagining and voicing the thoughts and feelings of others,
ventriloquation (Bakhtin, 1935/1981), may have helped the chil-
dren to internalize multiple perspectivesthe perspectives of self
as reader, and self as character(s)within the reading event. The
transformed self, alive with new and diverse voices, is richer in re-
lational capacity. Such capacity is then brought to bear in later
relational contextsin this case the creating of a family narrative
from a wordless picture book. This is consistent with the notion
that language is constitutive of the self and that higher mental
functions like thinking (Vygotsky, 1978) and social imagination
(Fernyhough, 2008) are developed through the complex appro-
priation (internalization) of social interactions. The notion of
ventriloquation involves the process of imbuing the wordsin
this case the perspectives and emotions of otherswith ones
own intentions. The ability to tell a richer story, one with multi-
ple voices, may be thought of as a consequence of this action of
ventriloquation.
It also reects the widely held belief that reading changes us
and that reading comprehension is an active generative process
between reader and text within a set of nested contexts. It seems
reasonable to assume that this kind of complex self-activity would
require many such focused social experiences before appropria-
tion of the otherness of the characters could result in a more
developed relational capacity. Indeed, the design of the RORI
framework provided many such focused relationally oriented
experiences.
It is also important to consider the possible role of the let-
ter writing, and to speculate on the meaning of these results as
related to some of the processes children might have been us-
ing to accomplish social imagination. As pointed out earlier, chil-
drens letters represented several types of relational responses,
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as noted in the Typology of Relational Response (See Table 6).
Given our research question and study design, in which we pur-
posefully used writing as an intervention strategy to develop re-
lational capacities, we were not surprised to see social imagina-
tion, perspective taking, and, in some instances, a broader sense
of care emerge in the letters. What was more surprising was the
number of kinds of responses that were personal expressions of
emotion on the part of the participant, rather than the charac-
ters in the story. In fact, writing samples that fell into the Per-
sonal Response and Personal Response with a Reason were
most common. While the genre of letter writing may in some
ways provoke personal expression, it may also be that children
used personal expression to connect to the character in the text.
For example, the response I feel sad because you are different
suggests that kind of process. Perhaps the personal expression of
emotion in the childrens writing was a way of bringing relational
history to bear in understanding the characters. Indeed, in most
of the childrens letter writing some form of personal expression
and personal response with a reason (PE and PR) in the typology
was present, along with the more sophisticated statements about
the thoughts and feelings of others. This is consistent with the
notion that memories and emotions of our relational histories
are resources for use in making sense of text and understand-
ing for others (Bird & Reese, 2006; Bolby, 1982; Chodorow, 1989;
Winnicott, 1971).
In terms of comprehension, these children as a group ap-
pear to have improved in their capacities to understand texts as
assessed by the listening comprehension (LC) and narrative com-
petence (NC) tasks. In fact, it seems that their performance on
the listening comprehension task improved by more than two
standard deviations and on the NC task by one standard devia-
tion. These results seemto suggest that childrens abilities to make
sense of stories grew signicantly during the 8 weeks of the study.
Moreover, these children in particular were recommended for the
study because of their difculties with comprehension and were
assessed at the outset of the study as being at least one grade level
below their more typically developing peers in the area of reading.
Because children with difculties often progress more slowly than
their more able peers, these results may represent real and valu-
able gains. It should be taken into account that the assessments
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Reading and Social Imagination 555
were the same for both before and after data gathering. However,
given that there were 8 weeks between assessments, and that the
children received no feedback on their performances, the effects
of this repetition should be minimal.
Interestingly, gains on the LC appear somewhat dramatic in
comparison to those in the NC task. From a dialogic perspec-
tive, the researcher is creating the narrative context by reading
aloud, within which the child may transact with the meanings of
the text. In the WPBR task the child is called on to create the
narrative him/herself with the visual scaffold of the illustrations.
As such, the creation of the narrative itself is dependent on the
dialogic transaction between the reader and the visual text. This
requires active engagement, openness, and capacity for taking up
the relational opportunities afforded by the text, as well as oral
language competence.
As described earlier, the NC task involves assessing the childs
reference to characters thoughts and feelings as part of the to-
tal score. Of course noticing the thoughts, feelings, and inten-
tions of characters is the primary focus of our earlier analysis of
the WPBR. However, childrens improvements on the NC task in-
volved additional aspects of the WPBR, including the use of tem-
poral and causal markers, such as when, then, if, and because.
In effect, most children got better at articulating the thoughts,
feelings, and intentions of characters as they simultaneously made
gains in other aspects of narrative competence, such as creating
dialogue, or adding temporal or causal markers. An example of
this would be as follows. The child might read in the rst WPBR,
She is sad. The boy draws a picture. In the second WPBR, She is
sad because she is sick, so the brother draws a picture for her. In
the second example the child also adds a causal marker, because,
in addition to noticing specic feelings of the character. In the
rst WPBR the child reads, The girl sees the boy on the swings
with the person. In the second reading she reads, Then she was
looking at the dad swinging the boy and she was feeling really sad
cause she cant go outside. In Bruners terms, in the second read-
ings these children as a group constructed a fuller landscape of
consciousness and used more narrative markers to link this land-
scape of consciousness to the landscape of action. This is consis-
tent with Bruners work, in which he found that attention to con-
sciousness resulted in more detailed and more lengthy retellings
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556 J. T. Lysaker et al.
in adults. One interpretation of this is that when children began to
imagine the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of the characters,
this led them to generate a more detailed and coherent narra-
tive, because imagining the perspectives of the other gave them
insight into the reasons for actions.
Once reasons for actions are inferred, then causation and
temporality may become important, all resulting in longer and
more detailed narratives. In this way, attending to the inner world
of characters may lead to greater understanding of other aspects
of ctional text, such as plot, cause, and effect. It is important
also to recall that the assessments of comprehension did not
demand any decoding on the part of the child. This of course
inuences our interpretation of the data. It may be that the de-
velopment of understanding alone is accelerated by the absence
of the demands of decoding. Alternatively, the development of
comprehension may not be noticed in the same way in traditional
assessments where children are asked to decode.
In sum, developmental as well as literacy assessments done
before and after the reading intervention showed statistically
signicant improvements in social imagination, listening compre-
hension, and narrative competence. Analysis of writing done dur-
ing the intervention indicates that childrens developing capacity
for social imagination within the instructional context is demon-
strated in several types of responses, which may represent a range
of relational sophistication. Together these data provide initial
evidence linking the development of social imagination to the
development of listening comprehension and narrative compe-
tence. While it is widely accepted that there is a relationship be-
tween language development and social imagination, this study
may suggest that that relationship extends to the event of reading
and that this development is sensitive to instruction. That is to say
that social imagination does not just develop along with language
across childhood, but that the purposeful use of particular lan-
guage events such as Relationally Oriented Reading Instruction
may more rapidly enhance childrens social imagination. Perhaps
being human and being literate are bound together by a common
capacity for relationship. As Charles Taylor (1991) suggests, we are
interpreting animals, who are most fully ourselves when actively
interpreting, that is making sense of and forging connections be-
tween ourselves and others. Both real world social interactions
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Reading and Social Imagination 557
as well as ctional ones draw out and foster this capacity for re-
lation. From a dialogic perspective such interactions allow us to
increase, diversify, and deepen the conversations that constitute
the self, leading us to better understand ourselves and others.
Limitations and Future Directions
There are several limitations to this study. First, this is a small
study, with 22 children receiving the intervention in one setting.
Larger studies in multiple settings are needed to replicate these
results. Second, we did not assess outcomes among the control
group at a second time point, and there was no control group
(e.g., standard reading interventions) for students with reading
and social difculties. Consequently, it cannot be determined
whether children receiving any type of instruction might have
made similar gains. For example, we dont know what the effects
of simply being in a small reading group in addition to regular
classroom reading instruction would be regardless of the content
or pedagogy used in those groups. That said, the group as a whole
made gains overall exceeding one standard deviation, a degree of
change that would not be expected as a function of time or usual
development among children who are socially challenged. In gen-
eral, research on instruments such as the Faux Pas and Eyes Tests
suggests that capacities assessed by these measures tend to be rel-
atively stable over such short periods of time.
As a whole, results thus may only be taken as suggestive that
RORI led to gains and may legitimize its future study. Needed next
are randomized controlled trials offered in multiple sites and with
more comprehensive assessments of reading and social imagina-
tion. In addition, more follow-up assessments of reading and so-
cial outcomes are needed to determine whether any gains linked
to the intervention remain over time.
Future work is also needed to examine in more detail the dis-
course of the groups to better evaluate the role of language in
RORI. Such analyses may allow us to better understand the ways
in which this particular approach to instruction may differ from
others, and how specically discourse may be linked to gains in re-
lational capacity made by the children. Finally, future work should
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558 J. T. Lysaker et al.
also gather more letter writing data in order to develop more fully
the typology of relational responses begun in the current study.
Implications
This study is potentially signicant in several ways. First, it pro-
vides a modest beginning in gathering much-needed data on how
schools might help children develop their capacities to under-
stand, connect with, and care about others in ways that t read-
ily into classroom life. Indeed, at a time when teachers feel the
pressure of having to address multiple pressing needs of children,
the usefulness of instruction that can serve childrens academic
and interpersonal needs simultaneously may be particularly
useful. Importantly, because this work suggests that reading in-
struction can lead to simultaneous enhancement of childrens
relational capacities, both in terms of social imagination and in
terms of text comprehension, we think that it broadens our think-
ing about reading pedagogy in unusual and signicant ways. Be-
cause reading is regarded as an event of the self, this work may
contribute to our thinking about comprehension. For example, it
may be that RORI deepens comprehension processes by focusing
intently on the interpersonal connections that a person makes
with characters and frames the understanding of text as a set of
ongoing conversations between the person and the others en-
countered in the reading event. In this way the current project
may contribute to conceptual models of reading by more specif-
ically articulating and assessing some of the relational and moral
aspects of the reading event heretofore absent in our reading
models. Finally, because this study links the development of social
imagination to reading, it may in some small way contribute to
our growing awareness of the role of literacy in the development
of the child. While academic achievement is undeniably an im-
portant concern of educators, we often seem in danger of think-
ing this is the only role of schooling. This study lends support to
those who see schooling as a place where above all personhood is
developed (Packer & Greco-Brooks, 1999), a place that educates
more broadly and whose primary vision is focused not on the kind
of achievement, but on the kind of people we are bringing into
being in our schools.
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Reading and Social Imagination 559
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Appendix A
RORI Framework
Session 1: Teacher as Authentic Responder
Oh that seems hard . . . and wonder how he will handle it.
I wonder what hes thinking now.
She seems to be worried.
If I were (name a character) that would make me feel . . . .
Wowthat has never happened to me. It makes me think I
want to be more . . . .
This is making me . . . worry, nervous, feel sad. . . .
The look on her face makes me think that she feels . . . .
The way he is looking at her makes me think he is angry.
Session 2: Teacher as Provocateur of Dialogic Response
In what ways or how does this story remind you of your own
life, how did you feel in this circumstance?
What kinds of things went through your mind when some-
thing similar happened to you?
Why do you think s/he decides to. . . .?
Why do you think s/he feels . . . .?
Why is s/he telling the story?
If you were (name a character) how would you be feeling,
what would you be thinking?
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Appendix B
Narrative Competence Assessment (adapted from Paris & Paris, 2003)
Element Description Example
Characters
References to or naming
of characters
he, sister, Dad
Setting