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Reading Psychology
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Reading and Social Imagination:
What Relationally Oriented
Reading Instruction Can Do for
Children
Judith T. Lysaker
a
, Clare Tonge
b
, Darren Gauson
b
& Angela Miller
b
a
Department of Curriculum and Instruction , Purdue
University , West Lafayette, Indiana
b
College of Education , Butler University ,
Indianapolis, Indiana
Published online: 23 Nov 2011.
To cite this article: Judith T. Lysaker , Clare Tonge , Darren Gauson & Angela Miller
(2011) Reading and Social Imagination: What Relationally Oriented Reading Instruction
Can Do for Children, Reading Psychology, 32:6, 520-566
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02702711.2010.507589
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Reading Psychology, 32:520566, 2011
Copyright
C
Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0270-2711 print / 1521-0685 online
DOI: 10.1080/02702711.2010.507589
READING AND SOCIAL IMAGINATION:
WHAT RELATIONALLY ORIENTED READING
INSTRUCTION CAN DO FOR CHILDREN
JUDITH T. LYSAKER
Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Purdue University, West Lafayette,
Indiana
CLARE TONGE, DARREN GAUSON, and ANGELA MILLER
College of Education, Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana
Twenty-two second and third grade children experiencing difculties with social
relationships and reading comprehension participated in small group Relation-
ally Oriented Reading Instruction for eight weeks. Developmental and literacy
assessments done before and after the reading intervention showed statistically
signicant improvements in the understanding of text and in social imagina-
tion. Analysis of writing samples resulted in a typology of relationally oriented
response. Together these data provide initial evidence linking the understanding
of texts to the development of other relational capacities like social imagination,
and indicate that purposeful use of picture books within relationally oriented
reading instruction may enhance this development.
The achievement of early and sustained reading prociency is a
major focus in United States schools, and there is ongoing con-
cern with those children who experience difculty in becoming
successful readers. Over the past decade reading interventions
have been implemented widely for those who struggle to read.
While many of these interventions have focused on instruction of
one or more skills considered necessary for reading (phonolog-
ical awareness, decoding, and word identication), recent inter-
ventions have demonstrated a renewed interest in reading com-
prehension. These interventions have addressed such aspects of
the comprehending process as vocabulary, story structure, and
metacognition (Boulware-Gooden, Carreker, Thornhill, & Joshi,
2007; Westerveld & Gillon, 2008). Yet few reading interventions
Address correspondence to Judith T. Lysaker, Department of Curriculum and
Instruction, College of Education, Purdue University, Beering Hall of Liberal Arts and
Education, Room 4108, 100 N. University Street, West Lafayette, IN 47907. E-mail:
jlysaker@purdue.edu
520
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Reading and Social Imagination 521
focus specically on the ability to construct inferences, to imagine
something beyond that which is explicitly stated. This ability is a
critical component of reading comprehension and necessary for
deep engagement in text (Duke, Pressley, & Hilden, 2004; Sweet
and Snow, 2002).
The comprehension of text is not the only challenge children
face. Understanding other peoples thoughts and feelings is also a
difcult task for many. Social problems, such as bullying, have be-
come common, and schools are more than ever concerned with
childrens abilities to have positive social relationships and to un-
derstand the perspectives of other people (Slee & Mohya, 2007).
Socio-emotionally focused curricula and character education pro-
grams have been implemented in schools to address these social
issues and help children develop greater social sensitivity and un-
derstanding. Beyond local and immediate school concerns, there
exists a more general concern for nurturing global perspectives
and helping children develop moral imagination (McCollough,
1992) and the ability to understand and care for others in deep
and abiding ways (Noddings, 2005).
Unfortunately, there are many children who face both dif-
culties. They have difculty understanding text and difculty
with social relationships. In fact as many as 75% of children with
learning difculties are perceived by teachers as having less de-
veloped social skills than their peers (Wanzek, Vaughn, Kim, &
Cavanaugh, 2006). In addition, children who struggle with read-
ing alone are more likely to have difculties across their school-
ing experiences as well as in life more generally (Committee
on the Prevention of Reading Difculties in Young Children,
Snow, Burns, & Grifn, 1998). It is widely accepted that success-
ful reading depends on engagement in a variety of social con-
texts in the form of small group instruction, book discussions,
and the like, the benets of which are dependent upon chil-
dren understanding each others responses to books as well as
to the teachers instruction. In fact, social dynamics of instruc-
tional groupings have been found to impact the reading success
of struggling readers in particular (Matthews & Kesner, 2000).
Taken together, we can reasonably assume that the combination
of social and reading difculties would have a profoundly nega-
tive impact on a childs experience of reading and of school more
generally.
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522 J. T. Lysaker et al.
Yet, perhaps because social and academic problems are most
often seen as being about different things, they are frequently ad-
dressed as discrete phenomena: social problems are addressed
through social interventions and reading difculties through
reading intervention. We considered the possibility that these
phenomenareading and social difcultiesmight have some-
thing in common. Since successful reading experience often in-
volves a readers ability to relate to the text and to imagine the
reality of the other (Langer, 1995; Rosenblatt, 1938/1983), we
wondered if the understanding of people and the understanding
of text might draw upon a common relational capacity, the capac-
ity for social imagination, that is the ability to understand how
others think, feel, and believe. We reasoned that approach-
ing these problems as relational difculties might prove useful
in helping children improve both reading and social imagina-
tion. While picture books are commonly used to foster personal
connections (Sipe, 2000, 2002), prompt discussion of emotions
(Campbell, 2001), and encourage moral reasoning (Clare & Gal-
limore, 1996; Koc & Buzzelli, 2004), we know of no study that
systematically uses picture books in a reading intervention to fa-
cilitate childrens personal development of social imagination.
The purpose of this study was two-fold. First, we wanted to
explore the links between comprehension of texts and the ca-
pacity for social imagination among children experiencing dif-
culties with reading and social relationships. Second, we wanted
to investigate the effects of a reading intervention on both the
comprehension of text and social imagination. Because we were
interested in childrens inferential understandings of text, we fo-
cused on aspects of comprehension not inuenced by difcul-
ties with decoding. Therefore, assessments of listening compre-
hension and narrative competence were used as indicators of text
comprehension. Our research question became: Can the system-
atic, purposeful use of childrens literature in a reading inter-
vention positively inuence the listening comprehension, narra-
tive competence, and social imagination of children identied
as experiencing difculty with social relationships and reading
comprehension? To answer this question we designed a relation-
ally oriented reading intervention that focused on the relational
capacities of social imagination and text comprehension within
ctional picture book reading events.
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Reading and Social Imagination 523
Theoretical Perspective
This study is located in a view of language and literacy as em-
bodied, relational, and dialogic processes (Bakhtin, 1935/1981;
Halliday, 1975; Lysaker, 2007; Vygotsky, 1978), and the person
who readsthe selfas a dialogic, uid, ongoing set of conver-
sations (Bakhtin, 1935/1981; Hermans, 2001; Hermans & Dimag-
gio, 2004; Lysaker & Lysaker, 2005). Central to this view is the
belief that language, as well as the practices of reading and writ-
ing, communicate, construct, and constitute who we are and
how we experience the world in physical, psychological, and
phenomenological ways. From this viewpoint reading is essentially
relational, dialogic activity of the self, and the teaching of reading
is inherently concerned with the development of the human be-
ing (Lysaker, 2006, 2007; Rosenblatt, 1938/1983). Thus, language
events like reading, writing, and the conversations in which they
are embedded become the raw materials for self-construction,
including the capacity for social imagination, which is the fo-
cus of this study (Carpendale & Lewis, 2002; Fernyhough, 2008;
Hermans & Dimaggio, 2004; Vygotsky, 1978).
This particular view of language is nested in a broader so-
ciocultural view that suggests that literacy development, as well as
the development of the individual more generally, is mediated by
signs and fostered by participation in social interaction (Bruner,
1986; Halliday, 1975; Wertsch, 1985). The meanings and the lan-
guage of those interactions become semiotic resources for later
language use and, when internalized, lead to an individuals de-
velopment of higher mental processes (Vygotksy, 1978). Thus,
like Matthews and Cobb (2009), we were interested in better
understanding specic aspects of individual development within
socially constructed literacy events. Such aspects include the com-
prehending of text and the capacity for social imagination. Inher-
ent in this view is the importance of the more able other who
guides participation in cultural practices within a zone of prox-
imal development (Vygotsky, 1978) through the subtle interper-
sonal process of scaffolding (Stone, 1993).
This perspective on the role of social interaction and adult
scaffolding in the formation of individual relational capacities
led us to design a small group reading intervention. In this in-
tervention teachers intentionally supported children in making
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524 J. T. Lysaker et al.
inferences and in using their social imaginations during picture
book reading.
Related Literature
Relational Capacity and Social Imagination
Relational capacity, the capacity for connection to others, our de-
sire for that connectedness, and our inability to be fully ourselves
without it, reects a set of concepts addressed across time and dis-
ciplines by those interested in describing qualities of the self and
self-experience. Many serious scholars have described and theo-
rized the nature, source, and importance of this quality of human
being. For example, Heidegger (1953) argues that to be in the
world as a human person is, in the rst place, to be in relation,
that a quality of our self is the presence of the other. Similarly, the
work of Bakhtin and those who have taken up his work (Hermans
& Dimaggio, 2004; Lysaker & Lysaker, 2005) conceptualizes the
human person as multivocal, an ongoing conversation of voices,
itself relational , and constructed within the relationships and lan-
guages of others. Feminists such as Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger,
and Tarule (1986) consider the ways in which we know and un-
derstand to be essentially relational; we know, learn, and grow
through our connections to others. This capacity for relationship
is so critical that Palmer (1998) suggests that the facilitation of stu-
dents capacity for connectedness is a critical part of the teachers
role. Given the uidity of self and the constructive nature of lan-
guage and social interaction, the formation and growth of rela-
tional capacity is considered a bidirectional phenomenon. That
is, the relationships that constitute the self are brought into exis-
tence through social relationships, while at the same time a per-
sons social relationships are made possible by the relational ca-
pacities with the self.
We use the term relational capacities to describe a wide
range of human potentials that involve being able to connect to
others and liken it to other capacities, such as the capacity to learn
or to love, that are both embodied and sensitive to the inuence
of language and social interaction. The focus of this study is one
particular set of relational capacities, which we will refer to as so-
cial imagination (Johnston, 1993; Rosenblatt, 1938/1983). Social
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Reading and Social Imagination 525
imagination is the ability to recognize and make inferences about
the thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and intentions of others. This set of
capacities is alternatively referred to across disciplines in a variety
of ways, including empathy, theory of mind (Baron-Cohen, 2001),
moral imagination (McCollough, 1992) and social understanding
(Fernyhough, 2008).
There are a variety of explanations for how relational capac-
ities such as social imagination develop in children. Fernyhough
(2008) describes several ways in which theorists have sought to ex-
plain this development. Some (Gordon, 1992; Harris, 1989) sug-
gest that social imagination develops froman individuals ability to
take the perspective of another and simulate the mental processes
of that other. Still others argue that the relational capacity for so-
cial imagination grows out of an innately human desire to share
our thoughts, feelings, and intentions with others (Tomasello,
Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005). Finally, Carpendale and
Lewis (2002) describe a theory of development that accounts for
the growth of social imagination as a product of social interac-
tion and the language that helps to construct and maintain those
interactions. Relationships between people in social settings de-
mand sensitivity to the thoughts and feelings of others and hence
promote the development of social imagination.
In addition to these psychologically oriented explanations,
theoretical work in neurobiology suggests that the development
of social imagination is predicated upon the observation and then
simulation of anothers empathetic responses by the observer
(Gallese, 2003). Such observations stimulate the brain in ways that
are similar to the ways in which the brain reacts when the person
exhibits his/her own empathetic response, evoking participation
in shared manifold of intersubjectivity (Gallese, p. 34) and ef-
fectively priming the brain for empathy. Indeed, this neurobio-
logical explanation of empathy ts well with social constructivist
thinking about language, and in particular Cambournes (1995)
notion of demonstration, in which he suggests that language is
naturally learned through observation of a more procient lan-
guage user.
Despite some differences in accounting for the development
of social imagination, all concur that being with others, both ob-
serving and interacting with them, is critical to the development
of social imagination, particularly those interactions in which
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526 J. T. Lysaker et al.
participants notice and respond to the perspectives of others
through language.
Social Imagination and Social Skills
It is perhaps not surprising to nd that relational capacities such
as social imagination are linked to school age childrens social
skills; when one is able to imagine the thoughts, feelings, and
intentions of others, one is more likely to be able to get along
with other people. Indeed, Liddle and Nettle (2006) found that
teacher ratings of childrens social competence correlated with
performance on tasks of social imagination in which children
were asked to imagine and respond to the thoughts and feel-
ings of others in a set of stories. Indeed, some hypothesize that
social imagination may develop in relation to a childs ability to
understand and process stories, that is, that narrative capacity in-
uences the relational capacity of social imagination (Liddle &
Nette, 2006; Szarkowicz, 2000). Thus the development of social
imagination may be seen as an important aspect of childrens
growth as social beings, and, specic to this study, potentially re-
lated to the comprehension of narrative texts.
Text Comprehension
Reading comprehension has become dened as a complex pro-
cess involving the elements of reader, text, activity, and/or context
(RAND, 2002; Sweet & Snow, 2002). Largely extrapolated from
the theoretical work of Rosenblatt (1938/1983), this denition
clearly lays out the role of the text, and the reading event itself, as
central to the act of comprehension. While theoretical perspec-
tives dictate differences in the relation between, and relative im-
portance of, these elements, as well as to what degree meaning is
actively constructed or extracted by the reader (RAND, 2002),
it is widely accepted that reading comprehension is inuenced in
complex ways by characteristics of the reader, text, and context,
and that making interpretations is an ongoing part of the process.
Indeed, the ability to make interpretations or inferences dur-
ing reading is considered critical to accomplished reading (Duke
et al., 2004; Keene & Zimmermann, 2007; RAND, 2002; Sweet &
Snow, 2002). Such interpretations involve a transaction between
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Reading and Social Imagination 527
reader and text in which the reader is able to relate to the text in
such a way that both the reader and the text are changed (Rosen-
blatt, 1938/1983). A new person and a new text are created with
each reading. Grumet (1988) suggests in her essay on bodyread-
ing that reading is a passage between self and world, in which
transformation resulting in a loss of the old self is always a risk.
Dialogism and Text Comprehension
It is useful at this point to return to the notion of the dialogic
self. In this view the self or person reading is conceptualized
as a uid, ongoing set of conversations (Bakhtin, 1935/1981;
Hermans, 2001; Hermans & Dimaggio, 2004; Lysaker & Lysaker,
2005). From this perspective, the activity of reading involves the
introduction of new voicesthose of the textin the conversa-
tion that is the self. The transaction that occurs between reader
and text consists of a conversation between the voices of text and
the voices of self, which, like other conversations, have the po-
tential to transform. In this way dialogism allows a more detailed
view of what occurs in a transaction between the person who reads
and the text and provides a way of understanding why reading
can lead to personal transformation. Indeed, reading comprehen-
sion might be viewed as an inner dialogue (Walker, 2005), a set
of conversations among the voices of the person and the voices
of the text. Importantly, this conversation is inuenced by the
context within which it occurs. In this light the process of mak-
ing inferences might be thought of as appropriating the voices of
others through language interactions (Lysaker, 2006, 2007). This
act of appropriation affords perspective taking, viewing the world
from the position of someone else, making it possible to infer the
thoughts, feelings, and intentions of the character. Thus compre-
hension of text is more than aesthetic response, cognitive pro-
cessing, linguistic knowledge, or cultural practice, but rather is a
relational, dialogic event of the self (Langer, 1995; Lysaker, 2006,
2007; Rosenblatt, 1938/1983).
A relational, dialogic view of reading accounts for the reader
in broad terms. Here the whole person who reads is considered,
and it is the persons relationship with the text that leads to per-
sonal transformation. In this study we use the phrase the per-
son who reads to replace reader in order to emphasize the
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528 J. T. Lysaker et al.
belief that reading comprehension engages the whole person as
an embodied activity. Indeed, dening reading as relational activ-
ity provides a way to integrate what are often segregated aspects
of reading: cognitive, linguistic, emotional, physical, social, and
cultural. In other words, dening reading as a relational event
reclaims the person who reads as a holistic and dynamic self. In
this study we use a modied version of the reader, text, and con-
text denition to frame our work and refer to reading compre-
hension as a complex relational, dialogic activity involving the
person who reads, the text as relational environment, and the
context.
The Person Who Reads
When one reframes a reader as a person who reads, and reading
as relational dialogic activity, new resources for making sense of
text emerge. Relational activity, unlike decoding or extracting
information, suggests that the person who reads, in addition
to background knowledge, brings emotional resources (Bird &
Reese, 2006), and relational histories (Matthews & Cobb, 2009)
to meaning making, or, as Ladd, Birch, and Buhs (1999) suggest,
a broader set of individual provisions. The relational history
of the person who reads is brought to bear in a reading event.
There are several ways to think about the ways in which relational
qualities might be signicant to the relational act of reading.
Winnicott (1971), for example, conceived of a metaphorical
space created by the childs relationship with a caring mother.
He considered this potential space to be the location of all
cultural and aesthetic experience, one that would include the
understanding of texts. The caring relational connection between
mother and child creates space, that is, the possibility of engaging
in other meaning-making experiences beyond the primary
relationship between mother and child. In addition, Chodorows
work (1989) goes on to suggest that the primary relationships
in our lives, along with the desires and other human emotions
that accompany them, are integral to the later relationships we
form. This particular view of relationships suggests that being
in relation with one caring other creates within the individual
person the possibility for knowing, interpreting, and imagining,
all of which are critical to the comprehension of text.
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Reading and Social Imagination 529
Attachment theory (Bolby, 1980) provides a related but
slightly different way of understanding the importance of these
relational histories. Central to this theory is the idea that chil-
dren need a secure attachment with a caregiver in order to de-
velop social and emotional well-being. This attachment, or close
emotional bond, is based upon a childs needs for safety and
in good conditions results in the childs sense of security. It is
within attachment relationships that children develop internal
models, or schema, for self and other. These representations are
then thought to inuence the childs expectations of him/herself
and others as they participate in other relationships. Second,
this attachment relationship forms a secure base (Ainsworth,
Blecher, Waters, & Wall, 1978) from which children are able to
explore their environment and participate in learning about the
world, including the world of texts. Bus and her colleagues (Bus
& Ijzendoorn, 1995; Bus, Belsky, Ijzendoorn, & Crnik, 1997; Bus,
2003) found that preschool children in secure reading dyads
read more often and paid more attention to their mothers infor-
mal instruction, characteristics of written language, and the read-
aloud event altogether. Moreover, the atmosphere of the read-
ing events of mothers and children who were more secure was
identied as more positive than in less securely attached dyads.
The relational history of the person who reads also provides the
context for the development of social imagination. It is within
attachment relationships, particularly those with caring others,
that children are thought to begin to be able to imagine the
thoughts, feelings, and intentions of others (Meins & Russell,
1997).
Put within a sociocultural context of learning and develop-
ment, these theoretical perspectives on adult/child relationships
highlight the role of emotional content and relational history in
the formation of the person who reads. Taken together they sug-
gest that these relational histories and the emotions that accom-
pany them may inuence the person who reads in several ways.
First, the childs capacity for aesthetic experience, including the
abilities to interpret and imagine, may be predicated on the qual-
ities of past relationships. Second, the childs eagerness, curiosity,
and desire to explore the world, including the world of text, may
also be shaped by relational histories. Third, the internal repre-
sentations of self, other, and the world that the person who reads
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530 J. T. Lysaker et al.
bring to encounters with texts are also likely shaped by his/her
early signicant relationships. Finally, relational histories provide
the context for the development of social imagination in the per-
son who reads, making it possible for him/her to imagine or in-
fer the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of others. Critical to
the current study, this work implies that present caring relation-
ships are also formative and contribute to the development of the
person who reads, continually recreating the relational histories
brought to bear during reading. Indeed from a dialogic view of
self-transformation, we posit that the potential space created by a
current secure caring relationship creates a hospitable interper-
sonal environment for the appropriation of new voices within the
self, thus supporting the comprehension of texts and the develop-
ment of social understanding.
The Text as a Fictive Relational Context
Theoretical perspectives on reading, as well as empirical research,
time and again suggest that the text a child engages with inu-
ences his/her reading process in complex ways (Duke et al., 2004;
Sweet & Snow, 2002). In fact, features of texts are regarded as crit-
ical to the quality of reading that ensues and the ways in which the
person engages in the reading. Most often perhaps, the linguistic
quality and cognitive demands of text are considered in choosing
books for children experiencing difculty with reading. Sentence
complexity, font size, number of words on a page, and the par-
ticular relationship between text and illustration impact the way
reading operates for young children. In addition, the degree and
kind of predictability, such as rhyme, rhythm, repetition of a body
of vocabulary, consistency of characters, and so on, also contribute
to the ways in which children are able to make sense of text.
However, this study examines a different kind of role that text
can play. Like Alexander and Jetton (2000), we view the text as a
kind of environment for the person who reads, which might be
regarded as open (Rosenblatt, 1938/1983) or considerate
(Armbruster, 1984), or conversely, closed and inconsiderate.
These qualities of text make it more or less possible for the person
who reads to engage the voices of the text in ways that construct a
rich reader/text transaction.
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Reading and Social Imagination 531
Text as a Relational Context for the Development of Social Imagination
This view of texts as relational contexts led us to consider the ways
in which they might serve as scaffolds for the development of so-
cial imagination in the person who reads. Indeed, the capacity
for social imagination has been linked to language development
and the understanding of story. A large body of empirical work
suggests that the development of language in children markedly
inuences the growth of social imagination (Astington & Baird,
2005; Carpendale &Lewis, 2002). This is consistent with the preva-
lent idea that language inuences cognition in many ways. Vygot-
sky (1978) and others in cultural psychology have long argued
that language and other signs used in the social sphere mediate
thinking and are regarded as the provocation for the develop-
ment of higher mental processes (Rogoff, 1990; Wertsch, 1991).
According to this view, the social interaction and the language
that accompanies it are internalized by actively involved partic-
ipants, leading to developmental transformations (Lawrence &
Valsiner, 1993; Vygotsky, 1978).
Given that language mediates cognitive activity as well as the
development of social imagination, it seems reasonable to assume
that texts, as well as the reading and the language practices used
to engage those texts, may also inuence the development of
social imagination. Indeed, the role of story in human experi-
ence suggests that story inuences the development of certain
relational capacities. Because stories unfold on two landscapes,
that of consciousness and that of action (Bruner, 1986; Rosen-
blatt, 1938/1983), narratives offer children a context within which
to understand the relationship between how people feel, think,
and act (Szarkowicz, 2000) and provide children with resources
for understanding the mental states of others, other than those
in their real world social interactions (Dyer, Shatz, & Wellman,
2000). Indeed, kindergarten children with more developed social
imagination retold stories from wordless picture books with more
frequent reference to characters thoughts, beliefs, and inten-
tions than those children with less developed social imaginations
(Pelletier & Astington, 2004). In sum, stories provide relational
contexts within which we are asked to imagine the motivations
and actions of others, which leads to enhanced social imagination.
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532 J. T. Lysaker et al.
Such activity is of course also critical to the comprehension of c-
tional text.
Dialogism and Text as Fictive Relational Context
We have thus far articulated our view of the person who reads
and the text as a particular kind of relational context and now re-
turn to the notion of dialogism to further explicate how aspects
of the individual person transact with the text in specic ways.
As suggested, if comprehension is a dynamic event of the self
that transforms the reader, then texts are important contexts for
self-development. Texts offer rich relational environments within
which we can reimagine ourselves by taking up the reality of char-
acters within the text (Johnston, 1993). In this way the act of read-
ing literature affords opportunities to explore possibilities for self-
authorship (Holquist, 1990; Zunshine, 2006). As Ricoeur (1991)
tells us, the appropriation of the identity of a ctional character
by the reader is a form of mediation of the self (p. 77). For
Bakhtin, language for the individual consciousness lies on the
borderline between oneself and the other (p. 226), and appro-
priation might be thought to involve ventriloquation, the speak-
ing of anothers words. Indeed, a sociocultural view of human de-
velopment relies on the notion that we develop by taking up the
language of others and imbuing it with our own intentions, that is,
the development of consciousness depends on ventriloquation
(Bakhtin, 1935/1981).
A literary text, then, may serve as a prosthesis of the mind
by providing relational resources for the ventriloquation of new
voices. Such activity requires that the person who reads engage
in perspective taking as she/he speaks, reads, or infers the origin
of anothers words. In fact, texts might be thought of as contexts
within which we are called on to exercise our relational capacity of
social imagination as we ventriloquate the perspectives of others
as part of the conversation that is self. This of course would lead
to self-development (Bakhtin, 1935/1981; Holquist, 1990). This
appropriating of the voices of others, identied within reading, is
so critical to the reading of ction that Zunshine (2006) boldly
asserts that ction is impossible without the readers ability to
imagine the reality of the other.
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Reading and Social Imagination 533
Given the powerful role of text, particularly ctional text,
to provide rich ctive relational environs for self-development, it
seems reasonable to assume that the use of particular kinds of c-
tional texts may be especially useful as resources for the develop-
ment of social imagination. From a relational perspective, books
in which the reader is introduced to characters with distinct hu-
man needs may be thought of as setting up relational demands
on the person who reads, demands that ask the reader to infer
the thoughts, feelings, or intentions of characters, that is, relate
to them, to take up their realties as our own, however briey. En-
gaging in these ctive relationships may then build the relational
capacity for social imagination.
Context of Instruction
Aspects of the person who reads and qualities of texts are only
two of the multiple and interacting inuences on the understand-
ing of text (RAND, 2002; Rosenblatt, 1938/1983; Sweet & Snow,
2002). In addition, the nature of the context within which the
reading occurs is important. In schools a crucial aspect of this con-
text is instruction. Reading instruction for children who struggle
with comprehension remains an area of concern and of inquiry
(Block, Gambrell, & Presley, 2002). Historically, reading compre-
hension instruction had been afforded little classroom time and
reected a narrow isolated skills approach (Durkin, 19781979).
Since that time, though frequently upstaged by concerns with de-
coding (Duke et al., 2004), approaches to reading comprehension
instruction have broadened to include direct strategy instruction
and the use of discussion and cooperative learning to facilitate
childrens development of text understandings (National Read-
ing Panel, 2000), with small group instruction being particularly
effective (Wanzek & Vaughn, 2007). With this in mind and in light
of our own beliefs about text comprehension and the person who
reads, we constructed a dialogic relational context for compre-
hension instruction.
Dialogism and Text Comprehension Instruction
Consistent with assumptions about the relational and dialogic na-
ture of reading, we approached the idea of reading intervention
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534 J. T. Lysaker et al.
pedagogy as similarly relational and dialogic. Based largely on
the theoretical positions of Bakhtin (1935/1981), dialogic ap-
proaches to literacy instruction regard the reading and discus-
sion of literature as inherently constituted by multiple responses
and interpretations of text, or multivocal (Langer, 1995; Nystrand,
1997; Skidmore, 2006). In contrast to what might be called a
more traditional approach, in which the teacher assumes an au-
thoritative voice within the instructional discourse, a dialogic ap-
proach to pedagogy suggests a greater reciprocity in communica-
tive stances on the part of the teacher and the students (Juzwik,
Nystrand, Kelly, & Sherry, 2008). Implied in this reciprocity is a
feeling of connectedness in the emotional tone of instruction, in
which the teacher acts and is perceived as an active part of the
community of learners. As Skidmore (2006) argues, dialogic peda-
gogy signals the co-presence of the teacher as a concerned other,
as a member of a community of learners through the emotional
rollercoaster ride of self development that occurs in social learn-
ing context (p. 513).
This ts well with others who suggest that the emotional tone
and the quality of relationships within literacy events are impor-
tant to literacy learning. As recognized earlier, Buss work (Bus
et al., 1995; Bus et al., 1997; Bus, 2003) suggests that the qual-
ity of the adultchild relationship in storybook reading inuences
the childs meaningful engagement in the story. She asserts that
the cognitive and linguistic input of the reading event is not ade-
quate for encouraging signicant engagement with text. A secure
attachment to the adult leading the reading event acts as a facilita-
tive emotional context for the reading. This notion is made more
relevant to reading in school by Al-Yagon and Margalit (2006),
who suggest that the benets of attachment relationships and the
idea of a secure base are also applicable to school-age children
with reading difculties.
It is this caring emotional tone and sense of reciprocity that
leads to dialogic rather than monologic qualities. Nystrand (1997)
identied three aspects that dene it as dialogical: the use of
authentic questions on the part of the teacher, uptake of stu-
dent ideas (Cazden, 2001; Collins, 1982), and the opportunity
for students to change the focus of the conversation. Dialogic in-
struction also stresses peer interactions and the sense of a learn-
ing community or reading collective (Nystrand, 1997) in order
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Reading and Social Imagination 535
to enhance intersubjectivity among the participants (Skidmore,
2006). In fact, dialogic instruction was found to be superior to
monologically organized instruction (Skidmore, 2006). In sum,
dialogic pedagogy is a socially constructed, emotionally caring
instructional context in which all participants contribute to the
joint construction of understandings. Most relevant to this dis-
cussion is the idea that dialogic pedagogy provides children with
demonstrations of the teachers authentic responses to text, in-
cluding empathetic response, perspective taking, and a more gen-
eral inhabiting of the text as a reader, and it invites children
to make similar personal connections to the text world. These
connections are accepted, valued, and reected upon by others
through discussion, providing a rich context for the development
of understanding as well as each readers contribution to those
understandings.
In this study, like Skidmore (2006), we regard dialogic in-
struction as a pedagogic genre (Bakhtin, 1935/1981; 1953/1986)
typied by a socially constructed pattern of discourse in which
roles and relationships are constructed and function as a frame-
work of how listeners and readers are to interpret what they read
or hear, how to take up an utterance, what to do or make with it
(Juzwik et al., 2008, p. 4). If texts provide a context within which
transformation can occur by the movement of self within the text
world, then the teacher may both be providing guidance in that
activity as well as serving as a model for how a reader may ac-
tively inhabit the world of the text. In such pedagogy, the teacher
and his/her own relationship to the text as articulated in facial expres-
sion, intonation, and language spoken aloud provide a physical,
emotional, and social demonstration of the activity of the self who
reads.
The notion of internalization is of particular importance in
considering the role of instruction as a context for the devel-
opment of comprehension and social imagination in children
(Vygotsky, 1978). Fernyhough (2008) articulates a Vygotskian ex-
planation for the development of social imagination, in which
he asserts that the dialogic exchangesor utterancesthat oc-
cur between people are internalized in whole as by those who
are engaged in the dialogue (Holquist, 1990; Vygotsky, 1978).
These conversations, consisting of both self and other, represent
a simultaneity of difference (Bakhtin, 1935/1981), a complex
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536 J. T. Lysaker et al.
intermingling of self and other that is both me and not me and is
therefore inherently perspectival (Fernyhough, 2008). As Ferny-
hough argues, the internalization of multiple perspectives as part
of interaction may therefore account for growing awareness of the
thoughts, feelings, and intentions of others, that is, the construc-
tion of social imagination. As in ventriloquation, this notion of
internalization does not imply mechanistic mimicry, rather a per-
sonally shaped appropriation of otherness as an aspect of oneself.
Applied to dialogic pedagogy, the teachers authentic responses to
text and the questions generated for children to consider provide
examples, physically and linguistically rendered, of personal and
dialogic encounters with otherness and may therefore be power-
ful resources for the development of social imagination of the
children.
Study Hypotheses
Conceptual and case study work describe texts and instructional
approaches that intend to support childrens socio-emotional
growth and social imagination (Doyle & Bramwell, 2006; Louie,
2005; Zeece, 2004) and suggest that reading with children has
the potential to enhance social imagination along with the under-
standing of text. However, we know of no study that has used this
as a basis for a reading intervention. It remains unclear whether
the systematic use of literature with purposeful instruction can
build capacity for relatedness, and if that capacity would mani-
fest itself in childrens abilities to better understand text and to
imagine the thoughts and feelings of others. Accordingly, we de-
veloped and implemented a reading intervention with a focus on
relational capacities and made the following predictions. First,
we expected that children referred to us because of difculties
with reading comprehension and social relationships would do
less well on measures of social imagination than peers without
these struggles. Second, we expected that children referred for
the study would improve signicantly on measures of social imagi-
nation and comprehension after 8 weeks of Relationally Oriented
Reading Instruction.
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Reading and Social Imagination 537
Methods
Design
A mixed approach to methodology based on a pragmatic stance
toward knowledge claims, research purposes, and measures was
used in this study (Creswell, 2003). We were concerned with the
practical consequences of a notion (James, 1907/1991, p. 23)
and sought to test the usefulness of the idea of relational ca-
pacity by applying it to a reading intervention for children in
need. In order to achieve this both contextualized and decon-
textualized goal, assessments from both the developmental and
literacy literatures were used. With the use of a variety of kinds
of data in a synergistic way, we would gain insights beyond what
could be generated by a single kind of methodology or disci-
plinary perspective (Day, Sammons, & Gu, 2008). In particular,
data collected within literacy eventswordless picture book read-
ings and response writingwere used to provide situated perfor-
mances of social imagination, while pre- and post-developmental
assessments were used to assess the more enduring qualities of so-
cial imagination as they occurred independently of the reading
activity.
Participants
This study took place in an elementary school in a midwestern
American city. The school population was approximately 680 stu-
dents at the time of the study, with about 58% of those children
being black, 25% white, 14% Hispanic, 1% Asian, and 8% mul-
tiracial. Approximately 57% received free or reduced lunch ben-
ets. All the children in the study were in the second or third
grade and came from multiple classrooms. Twelve children iden-
tied by their teachers as being accomplished both in reading
and in social situations were recruited to participate as controls
in phase one of the study. Twenty-two children identied by their
teachers as having both reading and social difculties were re-
cruited from four classrooms for participation in the intervention.
Children selected for the intervention ranged from one to three
grade levels below their peers in the area of reading. The Beaver
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538 J. T. Lysaker et al.
Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) was used by teach-
ers to assess reading comprehension. The DRA is a commercially
available eld-tested assessment system eld tested for reliability
and validity. DRA scores were used to determine comprehension
levels of all participants in relation to their grade-level placements.
Teacher observations of student social skills and emotional well-
being were used to select participants. Participants were of African
American, Euro-American, and Hispanic descent. Two were En-
glish language learners. Children already receiving counseling or
special education services were excluded from the study.
Relationally Oriented Reading Instruction (RORI)
A framework for instruction informed by dialogism and dialogic
pedagogy, as described earlier, was developed. In addition, this
framework was purposefully relational in orientation. Relation-
ally Oriented Reading Instruction (RORI) group leaders focused
their personal responses to texts on interpreting the thoughts,
feelings, beliefs, and intentions of characters.
In addition, other successful reading interventions that rely
on the use of small groups and existing models of interactive and
dialogic reading informed this framework (Wanzek, Vaughn, Kim,
& Cavanaugh, 2006). Children were engaged in small group re-
peated readings of picture books in interactive read-aloud ses-
sions typied by regular teacher think-alouds about the texts
(Barrentine, 1996; Doyle & Bramwell, 2006; Fisher, Flood, Lapp,
& Frey, 2004). However, unlike more cognitively oriented think-
aloud strategies, which focus on questioning, clarifying, summa-
rizing, and predicting (Palincscar & Brown, 1984, 1986), RORI
focused on inferring or imagining the thoughts and feelings of oth-
ers. In addition, consistent with dialogic pedagogy and caring re-
lationships (Skidmore, 2006), time and activities were provided
to promote a sense of mutuality, care, and trust within the small
learning community of each group. During the rst two ses-
sions group leaders and children designed a group logo, cre-
ated a group name, shared food, and talked about their favorite
books. Each child was given a binder, which they decorated with
the group name and logo, and a reading journal. Group lead-
ers also kept binders and reading journals and engaged in the
book groups with a sense of mutual interest in the books and
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Reading and Social Imagination 539
the childrens readings of them. Groups of four to ve teach-
ers identied second and third grade children who were led by
graduate students in education and supervised by the principal
investigator.
Children participated in Relationally Oriented Reading In-
struction 30 to 40 minutes twice a week for 8 weeks. The rst
week was spent establishing rapport and group identity. The last
week was spent reecting on the experience, dramatizing favorite
books, and providing other opportunities for closure and reec-
tion. During each of the intervening 6 weeks (12 sessions, 2 ses-
sions a week), a single picture book was used with the groups. We
used these books in the following order: Thank you Mr. Falker (Po-
lacco, 1998), Shrinking Violet (Best, 2001), The Story of Ruby Bridges
(Coles, 1995), Martins Big Words (Rappaport, 2001), Ians Walk
(Lears, 1998), and Fly Away Home (Bunting, 1991).
Each book was purposefully chosen for its specic potential
as a ctive context for children experiencing difculty; each book
portrays adults and/or children working through problems with
high socio-emotional content. Books with both male and female
protagonists, as well as books in which the main characters were
often experiencing challenges common in childhood, were used.
For example, Thank you, Mr. Falker is the story of a young girl who
struggles to learn to read. Shrinking Violet is a story of a girl who is
a victim of bullying in her class at school. Ians Walk tells the story
of a boy with autism, and Fly Away Home takes up the story of a
homeless boy living in an airport with his father. The Story of Ruby
Bridges chronicles Rubys experience of being the rst black girl
to go to an all white school, and Martins Big Words tells the story
of the life of Martin Luther King.
In order to set the social and academic purposes for the
groups while maintaining the exibility required for authentic
engagement, we developed an instructional framework consist-
ing of authentic personal responses and questions generated by
group leaders, in which a common set of connection stems were
used (Calkins, 2000; McLaughlin & DeVoogd, 2004). These stems
were designed to draw out personal connections as well as to
make explicit the focus for the RORI groups: the understanding
of the thoughts, feelings, intentions, and emotions of the char-
acters. (See Appendix A). Leaders provided a demonstration of
relationally oriented reading by making connections to their own
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540 J. T. Lysaker et al.
personal life experiences, expressing empathy or sympathy for the
characters and taking the perspective of the characters in a think-
aloud style during the rst session (Bereiter & Bird, 1985; Walker,
2005). To develop these authentic responses, leaders individually
read the picture books prior to the sessions and marked personal
reactions to the texts with post-it notes while using connection
stems to generate meaningful responses and questions. As is com-
mon in picture book reading, group leaders physically pointed to
illustrations as they offered their responses, to support joint atten-
tion to the visual information. In order to afrm and enhance the
readertext dialogue we asked children to make personal connec-
tions to feelings and events in their own lives by writing in their
reading journals at the end of the rst session of each week. Evok-
ing past events of personal life histories in language and connect-
ing them with present language activity may facilitate integration
of new experiences within the conversations of the self (Bird &
Reese, 2006; Lysaker, 2006).
In the second session, leaders prompted childrens personal
and authentic responses through questioning strategies and dis-
cussion. Consistent with dialogic pedagogy, group leaders both
honored and probed childrens initial responses to the text. For
example, group leaders would say things such as Yes. That is inter-
esting; I wonder why you thought about it that way. In addition,
group leaders led the discussions in such a way that children were
able to reect on their own reactions through contrast with the
reactions of others. For example, group leaders would make such
comments as, I can see how you are getting that feeling from the
picture, but its different than what Giles noticed. What do you
think about that? At the end of this session, children were asked
to write a letter to a particular character or from a particular char-
acters perspective (Brill, 2004) in order to give them the opportu-
nity to make some aspect of their relation to the characters more
permanent. Because these children struggled with independent
writing, group leaders often supported children in the mechanics
of the writing tasks. All sessions were observed by the principal in-
vestigator, and debrieng conversations were held after each ses-
sion, during which delity to the framework was addressed, and
problem solving occurred.
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Reading and Social Imagination 541
TABLE 1 Data Sources
Assessment Purpose Scoring
Eyes Test Pre/post measure
of SI
Number of times child
identies emotion in eyes
correctly from choices read
aloud
Faux Pas Test Pre/post measure
of SI
Number of stories about which
child can successfully answer
a set of questions regarding
social understanding
Listening
comprehension
Pre/post measure
of comprehension
Total score of questions
answered correctly
Wordless book
reading
Pre/post measure
of SI and
narrative
competence
Instances of SI counted
NC
Narrative competence
assessment modied from
Paris and Paris (2003)
Writing samples Assessment of
developing SI
Constant comparative analysis
resulting in eight conceptual
categories of response then
independent coding of
participants letters with 91%
interrater agreement.
SI = Social imagination.
NC = Narrative competence.
Data Sources and Approach to Analysis
Given assumptions about the relation between understanding
texts and understanding others, assessments of both social imag-
ination and comprehension were conducted (See Table 1). Chil-
dren completed three assessments of social imagination before
and after the intervention: The Eyes Test (Baron-Cohen, 2001)
and Faux Pas Test (Baron-Cohen & ORiordan, 1999), and a word-
less picture book reading (WPBR). In addition children com-
pleted two assessments of comprehension before and after the in-
tervention: a modied Informal Reading Interview (Roe & Burns,
2002) and an assessment of Narrative Competence (Paris & Paris,
2003). Assessments were conducted individually by graduate stu-
dents and supervised by the rst author. Usually the assessments
were done in two sessions. The two comprehension measures,
the modied IRI and the wordless picture book reading, were
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542 J. T. Lysaker et al.
conducted blind to the results of the tasks of social imagination.
The Faux Pas task, which contains British English, was modied
slightly in language to accommodate American English speaking
children.
Social Imagination Assessments
EYES TEST FOR CHILDREN
The Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test for children (Baron-
Cohen, 2001) consists of 28 photographically rendered sets of
eyes, which assess the ability to correctly infer the emotional states
of others, or what is often referred to as Theory of Mind. As the
children look at each set of eyes, the assessor reads and points
to the words surrounding them. These words, such as excited,
and pleased, represent a range of different emotions. The child
then chooses the emotion that he/she thinks best describes what
the person is thinking or feeling. The sum of correct items yields
the childs score. The Eyes Test is most often used to assess chil-
dren who have autism spectrum disorders. However, is it widely
accepted that the ability to read faces develops along a contin-
uum like many other human capacities, from less developed to
highly developed, and therefore is a useful tool to assess this abil-
ity in a variety of populations.
FAUX PAS TEST FOR CHILDREN
The Faux Pas test (Baron-Cohen, 1999) is designed for 7- to
11-year-old children and consists of a set of 10 stories that assess
childrens sensitivity to social situations. Each story contains a faux
pas, a social situation in which someone says something without
consideration for what the listener might want to hear or know
(Baron-Cohen, 1999, p. 5). These short paragraph-long stories
were read aloud to the children individually. Then four questions
were asked as provided in the assessment protocol. The rst ques-
tion asks the child to recognize the presence of a faux pas, and
the second question asks the child to identify what the faux pas
actually is. The third question is a straightforward comprehension
question to make sure the child comprehends the story in general.
The fourth question checks that the child understands that the
faux pas is a result of the speakers false belief and not meanness.
For example, if Sandra says that she hates truck drivers in a group
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Reading and Social Imagination 543
where one of her friends Mom is a truck driver, she is either
making a faux pas or being mean. A score of zero is given if the
child answers any of these questions incorrectly. All questions are
read aloud to the participants at the end of each story. A sum
of the scores for each story results in the childs total Faux Pas
score.
WORDLESS PICTURE BOOK READING
Both the Eyes Test and the Faux Pas Test were used because
they are established valid and reliable assessments of social imag-
ination. However, given our theoretical perspective on language
and self-development, we were interested in childrens perfor-
mance of social imagination and understanding of text within lan-
guage events. To assess this, children were asked to read the same
wordless picture book before and after the intervention. Word-
less picture book reading has a rich history in literacy research
as a means by which to see capacities and processes of a reader
not bound to decoding (Lysaker, 2006; Paris & Paris, 2003; Sulzby,
1985), as well as in developmental research for assessing social
imagination (Pelletier & Astington, 2004). We reasoned that such
reading events would allow us to view the childrens capacity for
social imagination as they appropriated the characters positions,
thoughts, and feelings during the reading of the story (Lysaker,
2006).
The book I Had Measles, part of a wordless book series called
Wright Way Home, published by the Wright Group, was chosen
because of the number and familiarity of the characters, and the
use of childhood illness as the central problem. These qualities of
the book we thought afforded many possibilities for children to
make personal connections to the story, enhancing the possibility
for relating to one or more characters. Before the child began
reading, we read the title to the child and explained that measles
used to be a common disease, similar to chicken pox.
Using the denition of social imagination as the ability to un-
derstand the thoughts, feeling, beliefs, and intentions of another, a con-
ceptually based coding scheme was developed so that we could
identify the presence of this relational capacity within the narra-
tives produced during the picture book reading and note patterns
in childrens responses in the two readings (see Table 2). Data
were quantied in order to be able to determine the degree to
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TABLE 2 Conceptually Derived Codes for Social Imagination Within the
Wordless Picture Book Reading Event
Code Denition Example
T = Thoughts Inhabits the character and
voices thoughts of
character, or reects on
the thoughts of a
character from narrator
position
Oh no, Im in bed today.
Get off me cousin, Im
trying to take a nap.
(Inhabiting)
Mom came in and checked
my face. You got the
measles. (Inhabiting)
Do you feel alright?
(Inhabiting)
His dog wanted to know
what was wrong with him.
(Reecting)
F = Feelings Inhabits the character and
voices feelings of the
character or reects on
the feelings of the
character from narrator
position
Readers statement
demonstrates the
attribution of feelings to a
character
I love you dad she said.
(Inhabiting)
Shes getting up in the
morning for a good
mood, and shes not in a
good mood. (Reecting)
She was still in the house
looking sad. (Reecting)
All they wanted to do was
play with him.
(Reecting)
I = Intention Readers statement
demonstrates the
attribution of intention to
a character action.
The boy was trying to make
his sister feel better.
One day a kid was sick and
his little brother was a
trying to wake him up.
His little brother was
checking on him.
which childrens readings changed over time in terms of social
imagination, as represented in their reading performance. Word-
less book readings were analyzed for the number of instances of
social imagination present in the reading. Instances were deter-
mined by counting the number of times the child demonstrated
an understanding of thoughts, feelings, or intentions of charac-
ters as she/he told the story. One point was assigned if the child
either voiced the thought of a character through dialogue or re-
ected on the thoughts of a character from the narrator position.
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Similarly, one point was assigned if the child voiced the feelings
of a character or attributed feelings or intentions to characters
though narration. The interrater reliability for this was assessed
by two raters blindly rating one third of the WPBR for instances
of social imagination. Intraclass correlations revealed a signicant
amount of interrater agreement (r = 0.95, F (1, 19) = 21.75, p <
.0001).
LETTER WRITING
In order to gain a view of childrens relationally oriented
thinking as it occurred during the study, letters that children pro-
duced during the RORI sessions were collected and analyzed. Us-
ing a constant comparative approach we read, discussed, and con-
structed eight conceptual categories in the responses of the chil-
dren, keeping the overarching idea of relational capacity in mind.
Using these categories, we then independently coded a set of par-
ticipants letters with 91% interrater agreement.
Text Comprehension Assessments
LISTENING COMPREHENSION
Text comprehension was assessed in two ways, one traditional
and product-oriented, the other process-oriented. First we used
an informal reading inventory (IRI), a traditional assessment with
established reliability and validity to correlate with other quantita-
tive assessments. Informal reading inventories provide a sequence
of passages with a set of comprehension questions for each pas-
sage along a gradient of difculty identied by grade level (Roe &
Burns, 2002). This instrument was modied in two ways. First the
passages were read aloud to the children, in order to eliminate
the confounding inuence of poor decoding skills. Difculties
with decoding can be a particular problem for struggling readers
(Paris & Paris, 2003) and often interact in detrimental ways with
childrens abilities to make meaning (Hoover & Gough, 1990).
In addition, listening comprehension is considered a useful
predicator of reading comprehension (Roe & Burns, 2002) and
is particularly helpful in assessing aspects of narrative compre-
hension (Paris & Paris, 2003), making it a suitable assessment of
ctional picture book reading. Thus, comprehension difculties
reected in this data are more purely indicative of difculty of
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understanding text alone, particularly narrative text, rather
than being able to decode it. Our second modication of this
instrument was the addition of two questions that reected our
particular interest in the development of social imagination.
One question directly asked the child what the main character
might have been feeling, and one asked the child what the main
character might have been thinking. Second grade children were
assessed on level two passages, and third grade children on level
three passages.
NARRATIVE COMPETENCE
Text comprehension was also assessed through the wordless
picture book readings. Given the theoretical perspective on read-
ing conversation as a dialogue between the person who reads and
the text, we wanted an assessment that would provide us a view
into that conversation. Like other assessments of reading such
as miscue analysis, wordless book reading was used to provide a
window on the reading process (Goodman, 1970) without the
inuences of decoding. Like others (Paris & Paris, 2003; Sulzby,
1985), we reasoned that the ability to construct stories from books
is indicative of the comprehension of story and might be con-
sidered a performative view of text comprehension. Accordingly,
a rubric based on the Narrative Competence task developed by
Paris and Paris (2003) was constructed (see Appendix B). For this
analysis we examined each wordless book reading for reference
to the story elements of characters, setting, problem, solution/
conclusion, as well as for picture comments and story comments.
Picture comments consisted of comments by children in refer-
ence to a particular picture, including describing objects, char-
acters, emotions, actions and opinions as well as character vocal-
ization (Paris & Paris, 2003, p. 44). Story comments were those
that demonstrated an understanding of the pictures as part of a
larger coherent story, including, narration, dialogue, book lan-
guage, and storytelling voice (Paris & Paris, 2003, Appendix A).
Points were assigned for each story element, picture comment,
and story comment, rather than assigning a holistic score. To ac-
curately capture growth over time, instances were counted rather
than collapsing responses into a gradient of development, and
thus losing subtleties in the data. The narrative competence anal-
ysis was done blind to social imagination scores as well as to the
listening comprehension scores. The interrater reliability for this
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TABLE 3 Correlations
1
of Comprehension, Eyes Test, and Faux Pas Test for
the Whole Sample (n = 34)
Reading Comprehension Eyes Faux Pas
Listening comprehension xx
Eyes Test 0.37

xx
Faux Pas Test 0.62

0.56

xx
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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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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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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1

S
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2
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4

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
D
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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.
D
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w
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l
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d

b
y

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P
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r
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i
v
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r
s
i
t
y
]

a
t

1
8
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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,
D
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s
i
t
y
]

a
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554 J. T. Lysaker et al.
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
D
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a
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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
D
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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
D
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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
D
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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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Reading and Social Imagination 565
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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566 J. T. Lysaker et al.
Appendix B
Narrative Competence Assessment (adapted from Paris & Paris, 2003)
Element Description Example
Characters

References to or naming
of characters
he, sister, Dad
Setting

References to place room, house, bed


Problem Reference to a problem
(counted once)
He was sick
Conclusion Reference to
solution/conclusion
(counted once)
The boy was trying to
make the girl feel
better. And so the boy
and the dad and the
girl read a book.
Picture Comments
Description of objects,
characters, emotions,
actions, opinions, and
characters vocalizations
He felt sad.
She tucked him in.
Get off me cousin!
She thought he was
getting better.
Story Comments
Temporal markers, i.e.,
then or when
Causal markers, i.e., so
or because
Performance markers,
i.e., the end
Book language, story
telling language, i.e.,
And they wanted to
play with him. All they
wanted to do was play
with him.
Dialogue with marker,
i.e., he said

Each different character was counted as one point.


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