The Reader in the Writer

The Reader in the Writer 54 The Reader in the Writer Myra Barrs Abstract This article discusses the role of reading, especially the reading of literature, in the development of writing. It suggests that the direct teaching of written language features is no substitute for extensive experience of written language. It gives a brief preliminary account of a recent centre for language in Primary Education (CLPE) research project on the influence of children's reading of literature on their writing at KS2. Through analysis of children's writing, the project explored the influence of children's reading on their writing. Its findings highlighted the value of children working and writing in role in response to literary texts. It looked closely at the kinds of teaching which made a significant difference to children's writing and documented the impact on teachers' practice of the introduction of the National Literacy Strategy. Introduction The first time I attended a conference in the USA for teachers of English, one of the teachers I met asked me `Are you a reading teacher or a writing teacher?'. This was the thing that made me realise why America needed the `whole language' movement. Although in the UK we often do talk about reading and writing as if they were separate, we have never divided reading from writing to the extent that they are taught separately on primary school timetables by different teachers, as has happened sometimes in the USA. Most teachers of English and literacy in UK primary or secondary schools, would agree that reading and writing are, as Vygotsky suggested, two halves of the same process: mastering written language (Britton, 1982). Now, with the National Literacy Strategy (NLS), official policy also seems to put these two halves together. But in this relationship, writing has been, at primary school level at least, the poor relation. For many years a child's `reading age' was a crude shorthand measure of their competence in English, even at age 11. The coming of the National Curriculum and the assessment of writing as well as reading, has at any rate changed all that. The new emphasis on writing (and current concerns about targets at KS2) has raised urgent questions about how children do learn about written language beyond the early stages, and what it is that marks progress in writing. The NC writing attainment target now makes this progress largely a matter of increasing technical accuracy, widening vocabulary, and increasing control over structure and organisation. However, the writing programme of study does also suggest that `pupils should be taught. . .(to draw) on their reading'. This may be the way in which teachers and pupils can go beyond the stripped-down agenda embodied in the new NC (DfEE 1999) and engage with the complexities of creating satisfying texts, both in fiction and non-fiction. The relationship between the writer and the reader The work of skilful and experienced children's authors, who know how to make worlds and engage readers, is one of the main resources we have for showing children what words can do. The critical fashion which highlights the role of the reader often ignores the role of the writer, referring us instead to the text. Yet writers are never as completely absent from their texts as reader-response theories imply; reading is always an act of relationship between reader and writer with the text as a meeting place, and this relationship may be particularly important for young reader/writers. The critic Bakhtin (1981) describes how the different space-times that the writer and the reader inhabit touch in the act of reading. In The Dialogic Imagination, he writes: `We are presented with a text occupying a certain specific place in space, that is, it is localised; our creation of it, our acquaintance with it occurs through time. The text as such never appears as a dead thing, beginning with any text. . .we always arrive, in the final analysis, at the human voice, which is to say we come up against the human being. . . . (Bakhtin, 1981) Bakhtin insists on the voice of the writer, which he maintains that we hear even when we read silently to ourselves. In order to understand the closeness of the relationship between reader and writer, it's important to realise that it is the writer's inner speech that we hear in our minds or ourselves give voice to, in our own inner speech. It's the very personal nature of this communication, direct from mind to mind, that makes reading such an act of intimacy. # UKRA 2000. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Rd, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. READING July 2000 Daniel Pennac (1994), a French teacher of literature, describes how he went about reawakening one class's enjoyment of reading, deeply buried under years of French secondary education, by reading aloud to them. The book he chose was Patrick Susskind's Perfume. When Pennac took the thick book out of his bag and announced his intention of reading it aloud, the class were horrified. (`You're going to read us that whole book, out loud?') They were also offended (`We're past the age for that'). But within ten minutes the students were hooked on the narrative, and on the author's way of telling it. Pennac reflects on what was going on. These were students who had forgotten that reading could give pleasure. Reading in school had been for them a constant series of tests; they were obsessed by a fear of not understanding what was read. Pennac suggests that one of the things that happened for them during the reading aloud was that they formed a relationship with Susskind, a relationship that began in their sense of the author's voice. `With the public reading of Perfume, they found themselves in front of Susskind: a story, of course, a fine narrative, amusing and baroque, but a voice as well, the author's (later, in their essays, this will be called his `style'). A story, yes, but a story told by someone. . . .The final page turned, it's the echo of that voice which keeps us company.' So these students learned to read again in a way that their academic French education had fundamentally inhibited ± for the pleasure of narrative, of listening to a storytelling voice. They developed a growing appreciation of how the writer was working on them. They become fans, admirers of the skills of Marquez, Susskind, Calvino, Salinger, Stevenson and began to look about for more books by the writers they liked; they wanted to immerse themselves in these books. Children respond to the work of particular authors from a much earlier age, perhaps from babyhood, from the moment when they begin to have a favourite book. When they start to be aware of writers and to become fans, they begin to read and listen, in a different way. Older children who have enjoyed a story often want to write one like it. As Margaret Meek Spencer suggests, `If we want to see what lessons have been learned from the texts that children read, we have to look for them in what they write.' (Meek, 1988). Our favourite texts are where, as readers, we apprentice ourselves to writers. A six year old girl began a story like this: The circus was coming, and the animals had babies. But one animal did not have a baby. She looked high and low for a baby to suit her. But no, she could not find one. (Barrs et al, 1990) # UKRA 2000 55 Here we recognise the signs of a writer learning to mark the tune of a story for her readers, drawing on her own experience of literary styles and rhythms. The rhythms are so strongly marked that we may be confident of this writer's familiarity with the language of books. We can sometimes track these influences in children's work more precisely, finding stories which seem to directly echo Enid Blyton or Jacqueline Wilson. But although children do often model their writing directly on known texts, when I asked one prolific nine year old writer where he got the ideas for his stories, ± whether he ever directly imitated the style of his favourite authors ± he replied succinctly: `I sort of get the feeling from reading lots of books' (Barrs, 1983). When we come to know books well, through rereading, we absorb their characteristic tunes and patterns, which find a place inside us. If we return in later life to a book that we knew in childhood, we immediately recognise those same familiar tunes. James Britton, in one of his last essays, discussed the experiences of recalling a poem through what he called its `powerfully remembered cadences', and suggested that poetry and literary language are remembered and stored partly as rhythms and partly as grammatical structures (Britton, 1993). Writers who are also readers are people with a large number of tunes and structures in their heads. Shaping writing The question of how children learn to shape their writing and what role reading plays in this learning is raised in a particularly acute fashion by a recent publication from the QCA (1999) called Improving Writing at Key Stages 3 and 4. Because of its title, primary teachers might be inclined to pass this report by, but it is an interesting document both in itself and for the insights it offers into currently fashionable views on what good writing is and how we learn written language. The pamphlet is primarily a report from a QCA project called the Technical Accuracy Project, which undertook a study of the linguistic features of different grade levels of writing in GCSE English. The project team investigated `large numbers' (no details given) of examples of GCSE pupils' writing in an attempt to analyse the linguistic characteristics of A, C and F grade writing. The findings are presented as a way of making explicit what it is about writing at a particular grade that makes it fit that grade. Thus, for instance, we learn that `A class' writing tends to make greater use of abstract nouns, parenthetical commas, subordinate clauses and place adverbials (rather than time adverbials) to link paragraphs. `F grade' candidates, on the other hand, characteristically link clauses by `and', make little use of adjectives, largely omit paragraphs and make sparse use of commas. The Reader in the Writer 56 This kind of information is of moderate interest, but of course it begs many questions. After all, as David Olson (1994) points out: Children of bookish parents may learn to speak with subordinate clauses, parentheticals and the like, marking structure lexically by means of subordinating conjunctions, relative pronouns and speech act verbs. Such bookish parents can do so because writing can and does provide a model for their speech. (Olson, 1994) What we need to know more about is how those `A' class candidates came to be able to manipulate these features of written language so confidently. The QCA project was confined to a study of technical accuracy only; issues of meaning and content were not under discussion. Unfortunately, there is a tendency within the pamphlet to present this way of looking at writing as a more reliable way of assessing effectiveness in general than that provided by more holistic approaches. ``The process of quantifying linguistic features'' claim the writers ``has enabled us to put flesh onto the qualitative judgements many English teachers habitually make''. The real problem, though, comes in the section of the pamphlet called `Implications for Teachers'. In this follow-up to the project, a group of English departments were invited to come up with plans for integrating the teaching of grammatical features into their existing teaching of reading and writing. Here is the usual trap and those involved in producing this pamphlet have fallen headlong into it. It is this: we may have discovered, or think we have discovered, that skilful writers at GCSE use more abstract nouns ± but that does not mean that teaching children to sprinkle abstract nouns through their texts will necessarily improve their writing. The kind of pedagogy that is described in the second half of this pamphlet is fraught with weaknesses. In one unit that was developed, pupils looking at paragraph linking were `given a ``quota'' in their own writing and encouraged to use two place adverbial links for every time link'. In another, pupils were asked to calculate the proportion of abstract and concrete nouns. We must hope that the experiences of these pupils were more meaningful than these summaries suggest. Did they justify, in terms of quality of writing, the tactics adopted by the teachers? Did they justify the time taken away from actual experience of reading and writing? Because no examples of pupils' writing are given, we are not permitted to judge for ourselves whether this kind of coaching actually achieved anything. It seems unlikely, for two reasons. Firstly, good writing usually involves a closer relationship between meaning and form than is assumed in this pamphlet. The focus on form rather # UKRA 2000 than content in these experiments seems unlikely to generate writing which is purposeful, focused, strongly felt, or strongly expressed. The pedagogical approaches adopted are the opposite of those described in the important recent report on Effective Teachers of Literacy (Medwell et al., 1998). One of that project's key findings about the teachers identified as particularly effective was that they believed that `the creation of meaning in literacy was fundamental', and focused attention first of all on the content of texts and on composition. In Improving Writing at KS3 and 4 (QCA, 1999), content and meaning come a poor second to the overriding preoccupation with linguistic features. Secondly, it seems inherently unlikely that these short-cuts to linguistic sophistication would actually work. Pupils who write skilfully and use language in striking and varied ways are likely to be linguistically experienced, especially in relation to written language. Direct teaching of particular linguistic features is no substitute for substantial experience of reading and writing. The role of reading, in particular, in teaching writing, is something that contemporary discussions of teaching writing need to take more account of. The research project A recent piece of research planned and conducted by the staff of the Centre for Language in Primary Education took a different approach to the improvement of children's writing from that adopted in the QCA pamphlet. We set out to explore a common supposition: that the quality of what children read is likely to affect how they write. We wanted to look particularly at the influence of children's reading of challenging literary texts on their writing development at KS2. Although our basic assumption could have been thought of as a truism, and is a central premise of the NLS, hardly any relevant research was identified in our initial search of research literature. Among the few studies which seemed to have a direct bearing on our topic was Carol Fox's (1993) At the Very Edge of the Forest, a study of young children's oral storytelling. Like Fox, we wanted to trace the relationship between children's narrative and literary competences and their experiences of books. The project involved six Y5 teachers and classes in five primary schools in greater London. The fact that all of participating teachers were teaching Year 5 was not a planned aspect of the study, but a fortunate coincidence. It enabled us to compare children's work across the project schools more easily and also meant that, because of the introduction of the NLS, all of the participating teachers were working to the same general objectives. READING July 2000 It was clear that the classes being visited were already involving children with high quality literature, but we nevertheless wanted to introduce an element of commonality across all six classes. We selected two `standard texts' to be studied, one in the Spring term: The Green Children by Kevin Crossley Holland (1994) and one in the Summer Term: Fire, Bed and Bone by Henrietta Branford (1997). These texts fitted well into the NLS Framework for Y5, which suggests that children should study legends and `explore the differences between oral and written story-telling' in the Spring Term and should look at the `viewpoint from which stories are told' in the Summer Term. The language and style of the books were powerful; we hoped that their influence would be detectable. Throughout the school year 1998±99 the project coordinator, Val Cork, visited the classes involved in the project, observing classroom activities, interviewing selected case study children and discussing the project with teachers. We collected all the writing by eighteen children across the six classes, and carried out in-depth case studies of six children, samples of whose writing across the year were analysed. Our aims were to examine any developments that took place in children's writing when they studied challenging literature, to investigate whether any kinds of teaching were particularly effective in teaching writing, and to observe whether any texts had a particular impact on children's learning of writing. The effect of writing in role One of the project's main findings concerns the effect on children's writing of writing in role. All the children were involved in working and writing in role during the project: in all the participating classes The Green Children was introduced with the help of a drama workshop, conducted by a drama consultant. This drama session, which occupied only one literacy hour, was an important intervention for children and teachers alike. One of its important features was that the introduction of the text itself was delayed until the fictional world and the themes of the story had been prefigured through drama. This had a big impact on the children, who seemed to relate much more closely and personally to this text because they had already `lived through' some of its events and situations. Following the drama work and the reading of the text, most children wrote in role as a character within the story. Their writing in role was almost universally well done and sometimes led to an observable shift in the case study children's writing. For instance, children filled in more imagined detail around the narrative, in a way that had obviously been suggested by the drama: It was a normal day when everybody would go to the fair, buy something, or go on terrifying rides. Bargains # UKRA 2000 57 going on and children breaking things and messing about. . .I even remember what kind of day it was. The blazing sun shone down on us. The ground was hot like fire, it burnt my feet, until everything went quiet, there was a big crowd of people all staring at one thing. Writing in role seems to be a real aid to children's progress as writers because it moves them out of their personal language register and into other areas of language. It involves them in writing in first person ± in a way that they are accustomed to and that is an extension of their speech. But it also involves them in taking on a different persona ± in a way that enables them to get inside other experiences and other ways of talking, thinking and feeling. As in any wellconducted drama session, children are enabled to access language that is beyond their normal range. The influence of quality literature As part of our data analysis of children's writing samples we took T-unit length, a measure of syntactic complexity, as one index of change in their writing. A T-unit is defined as `one main clause with all the subordinate clauses attaching to it' (Hunt, 1964). T-unit length is sometimes used as a measure of increasing maturity in children's writing. Any discussion of T-unit length, however, has to be preceded by an acknowledgement of the limitations of this measure; as Carol Fox (1993) points out: `it is pointless to value syntactic complexity for its own sake'. We certainly did not find that the length of children's T-units increased in any uniform way over the project year. What was interesting about the use of the measure, however, was the way in which it revealed the influence on children's writing of the texts that they were reading. For instance, S. was a writer who habitually wrote in relatively long T-units but analysis of her samples revealed marked changes in the length of her T-units in the course of the year. In her earliest sample, the average T-unit length was 11.1, and in her last sample it was 10.5. But in her middle sample, a piece of writing in role based on The Green Children, T-unit length fell dramatically, to 6.1. This was a striking change, but when we came to look more closely at the text she was writing in response to, the change became more explicable. Kevin Crossley-Holland's style in this book is plain and speech-based. The average T-unit length of a sample page from The Green Children, when analysed, proved to be 6.6, not very different from the average we found in the analysis of S's writing. It was apparent that S., in responding to Crossley-Holland's text, was mirroring these very short T-units. Not all of the children in the sample studied our second standard text, Fire, Bed and Bone, but those who did wrote very impressively in response to this book. The Reader in the Writer 58 Branford's novel is a historial novel based on the Peasant's Revolt; the narrator is an old hunting dog belonging to a family that, early in the book, is imprisoned because of their suspected complicity in the Revolt. The first chapter of the book is however a picture of peace; the whole household is asleep at night, in the same big room, with a fire burning. The hunting dog is awake; she is about to have puppies and expects them to be born next day. Her musings build up a picture of the world around the house. The following examples are not taken from the case study children's samples but are drawn from two particular classes, in order to show how high the general standard of writing was in response to this text: A child writing as Humble the cat: I am a creature of very different worlds. I know where the dormice nest in the oat fields. I know valleys that have deep blue rivers with the silver fish. I know the house and the warmest place in front of the fire. I know where the rats play at the back of the house. I know the tops of the tall pine trees. I know where the plumpest birds nest. I know the comfiest branch. Two children writing as the hunting dog, living in the wild with Fleabane her puppy: 1. That night was a cold one. Fleabane was asleep as soon as we got in from hunting. I soon dozed off but not for long. I sensed danger and my hackles rose. I got up and sniffed the air. I looked over at Fleabane, he was asleep. I was worried I didn't want to lose Fleabane as I did Parsnip and Squill. I strolled over to him and bent closer just to hear him breathe, and I rested my paw on his paw. I knew he was safe now but my hackles were still aroused. 2. I caught two wild hare. The glorious scent tickled my snout. I hurried back to Fleabane. I ran into the den. He was playing with some hay. He lifted his droopy eyes, I knew he was hungry. I gave him the small hare and kept my careful eye on him. I felt a sunbeam from the early horizon. I tucked into my hare. It was tasty. I could hear Rufus and Comfort, I turned to the doorway. I saw nothing. It didn't feel right being free as the wild wind while Comfort and Rufus were locked up. I wanted to be at home. Two children writing as Fleabane in captivity: 1. I lie fretting in an empty barrel. I run out the barrel forgetting the chain. I run so fast the chain pulls me back into the barrel, my ear catches on a nail and I yelp in pain. I can feel the hot sweaty blood dribbling down my face. The wolves barked last night as they spoke to me of freedom but I didn't want to think of freedom all I wanted was my mother. My mother used to tell me that humans were good, that they gave you a bed and a nice warm fire to sleep next to. I do not believe that. # UKRA 2000 2. The hole at the top of the barrel lets in a howling draught, a draught that sends frightening shivers down my back. Blood dribbles down the side of my face. I know I shouldn't try to escape, it's just so tempting. I don't want to move I only want to dream, dream of far, far away where I could forget my terrible memories of being beaten with the metal whips leaving cuts long and large, sharp and sore. Two children writing poems based on the first chapter of the book: 1. Rats playing in the kitchen munching and making noise. Fire sparkling brighter than the glowing sun. Ticking stars reflecting into a diminutive puddle. The tumbling of horses and a moon so bright it is beaming into my eyes. Foxes cry and run about on the crackly, mist green and copper brown ground. Bats fly through the smoke and smell of the ashes of the dying fire. My belly is aching with pain, it is torture. 2. Lying there ashes spitting on my fur as they die down slowly. Crackling from the windows as a small draft comes in and sways in my fur. Humble curling up towards me stroking her luxurious tail against my aching back. Chickens scuttling about rats tapping their tiny feet in the pantry. The calling of the owls as 'tis just coming morning. The bright moon shining shining on me as the crystal snow falls. . . . What was apparent in all the children's writing that was done in response to this text was the strong sense of empathy with the characters, especially the animal characters in the text. Children wrote with real feeling about the predicament of the scattered `family' and in writing as the hunting dog, especially, they seemed to `live through' and feel acutely some of the pains and anxieties of being a parent (`I didn't want to lose Fleabane. . .I bent closer just to hear him breathe and rested my paw on his paw' ). The writing was finely imagined in a detailed way that suggested that children were absorbed in the world of the text. Dorothy Heathcote says that drama touches on areas that are in the main avoided in school: `understanding of the place and importance of emotion, and language with which to express emotion.' (Heathcote, (1984). Fire, Bed and Bone is an emotionally powerful READING July 2000 text and it spoke to children strongly. Texts with emotionally powerful themes communicated immediately with children in the project classes. They seemed to help children to adopt other points of view and to explore the inner states of characters, taking on the language with which to express emotion. Children also responded to the poetic language of this text and to its music. Henrietta Branford's writing in this book, especially in the first chapter, exemplifies David Olson's (1994) description of literary language as `poeticised speech', yet is simple enough to be accessible to the whole ability range and to children learning English. Children's poems, in particular, echoed the incantatory rhythms of the first chapter. Transforming classroom practice Although the main aim of the project was to consider the effects of the study of challenging literature on children's development as writers, we also wanted to look at the kinds of teaching that seemed to be making a difference to children's progress in writing. But our project coincided with the introduction of the NLS and was therefore taking place in a far from typical year. We tried to turn this coincidence to good account by documenting as far as possible the impact of the NLS on the project teachers' practice. Although the teachers felt that NLS Framework for Teaching (DfEE, 1998) had helped them in planning a literature curriculum for each term, and raised their awareness of particular authors and genres, during the first term of implementing the literacy hour, they all began to voice the same major concern. They found that children did not have enough time to work on longer narratives and that many pieces of writing were being left unfinished at the first draft stage. The whole practice of a writers' workshop, where attention could be given to the development of children's texts, was being eroded, and the work in writing was becoming `bitty'. Some children complained because they had too little time to write. A number of the project teachers, with extensive experience of teaching writing, felt that the standard of children's writing was suffering. As a result of these concerns, five of the teachers decided to extend the time for literacy to one and a half hours a day and one teacher began to use two sessions a week for extended writing. By the end of the project year, all of the participating teachers had effected `positive transformations' in the literacy hour in some way, most especially to allow time for extended writing. Two practices which stood out as being particularly influential in these classrooms were the use of response partners to help children develop their texts and the use of reading aloud in the teaching of literature and writing. Most of the teachers we observed put a great deal of emphasis on encouraging children # UKRA 2000 59 to work on their writing together, through the use of response partners or writing partners. Lessons were structured in such a way as to allow time for children to read their texts aloud to a partner, and to respond to each other's writing. The use of pairs was more common, and appeared more effective, than the use of small groups for this kind of collaborative work on writing. The consistent use of response partners was popular with children. It helped to develop children's sense of the impact of their writing on a reader. The teachers in these classrooms, just like Daniel Pennac, believed strongly in the value of continuing to read aloud to older children and regarded this as an important way in which they could bring texts alive for them and engage them with literature. In some classrooms where children were inexperienced readers and writers, a particularly strong emphasis was put on rereading. Although children sometimes had copies of the text being read aloud, quite often they did not. Reading aloud seemed to be a particularly helpful way of foregrounding the tunes and rhythms of a text in a way that subsequently influenced children's writing. It was also a powerful prelude to the subsequent discussion of texts. Conclusion The new didacticism that characterises so much official discussion of the teaching of literacy and writing wants to short-cut some of the learning that goes on as children listen to, reread and reflect on texts that they have become familiar with. There is an impatience around, and this impatience is partly with learning itself, the time it takes, its idiosyncracies. It seems so much more efficient and time-saving to analyse the linguistic features that characterise successful texts and teach these features directly to children. But this `common-sense' approach needs to be set against another kind of common-sense, that of experienced teachers such as those included in our study, whose experience ± both generally and within the project ± had convinced them of the value of dwelling on texts in more depth and detail, of rereading, of reading whole texts rather than extracts, and of taking time with children's writing. Although our project was predominantly a study of writing development, over the project year children also began to read more demanding texts. They had been introduced to books that they might not normally have chosen and been taken in directions they might not normally go. In addition, they brought to their reading a growing consciousness of how writers work ± readers who are aware of what is involved in structuring a narrative experience for others are likely to read more critically and responsively. It seems unlikely that there can be any fundamental writing development without reading development, and vice versa. Once we fully recognise The Reader in the Writer 60 that progress in one mode is intimately related to an dependent on progress in the other, we should be better able to draw out the implications for teaching written language in a way which is both more unified and more effective. Acknowledgements I should like to thank the project co-ordinator, Val Cork, the staff and children of the project schools and all others involved in the project, including Susanna Steele, Fiona Collins, Margaret Meek Spencer and the staff of CLPE. References BAKHTIN, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. BARRS, M. (1983) Making Stories: Young Children's Fictional Narratives. Unpublished M.A. Dissertation, University of London. BARRS, M., ELLIS, S., HESTER, H. and THOMAS, A. (1990) Patterns of Learning: The Primary Language Record and the National CUrriculum. London: CLPE. BARRS, M. AND CORK, V. (in press) The Reading in the Writer: The Links between the Study of Literature and Writing Development at KS2. BRANFORD, H. (1997) Fire, Bed and Bone. London: Walker Books. BRITTON, J. (1982) Prospect and Retrospect. London: Heinemann. BRITTON, J. (1993) Literature in its Place. London: Cassell. CROSSLEY-HOLLAND, K. (1994) The Green Children. Oxford: Oxford University Press. FOX, C. (1993) At the Very Edge of the Forest. London: Cassell. JOHNSON, L. and O'NEILL, C. (eds) (1984) Dorothy Heathcote: collected writings on education and drama. London: Hutchinson. MEDWELL, J. et al. (1998) Effective Teachers of Literacy. Exter: University of Exeter. MEEK, M. (1988) How Texts Teach What Readers Learn. Stroud, Glos.: Thimble Press. The National Literacy Strategy Framework for Teaching. DfEE, 1998. OLSON, D. (1994) The World on Paper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. PENNAC, D. (1994) Reads Like a Novel. London: Quartet. DEPARTMENT FOR EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT/ QUALIFICATIONS AND CURRICULUM AUTHORITY (1999) The National Curriculum: English. London: DfEE/QCA. QUALIFICATIONS AND CURRICULUM AUTHORITY (1999) Improving Writing at Key Stages 3 and 4. London: QCA. CONTACT THE AUTHOR: Myra Barrs, The Centre for Language in Primary Education,Webber Row, London SE1 8QW. CALL FOR PAPERS BY GUEST EDITORS EVE BEARNE AND GUNTHER KRESS Texts are becoming increasingly visual, writing and image co-occur on nearly every page, multimedia technologies and electronic forms of communication are commonplace. These new forms of text demand a radical re-thinking of the traditional curriculum of language and literacy. The November 2001 edition of Reading will be dedicated to an exploration of the curriculum of representation and communication which deals with this new world. We welcome articles which contribute towards thinking on this issue, whether through analysis of children's production of multimodal texts, their pictorial and multimedia reading ± in classrooms and schools, homes and communities, or articles which take thinking further in a more general, even speculative way. SUBMISSIONS BY APRIL 1st 2001 # UKRA 2000