ABSTRACT
Part I of this book showed the central role of fiction as a way of coming to understand the world and the place of the individual in it, of developing literacy and nurturing the inner world of the imagination. All this is very much what comes to mind when we think of what is learnt in English lessons. In this second part of the book I turn to the contribution that non-fiction texts make in English and across the whole primary curriculum. Non-fiction, by definition, helps us understand about the world and its complexity and it certainly makes a huge contribution to children’s developing literacy. While the best non-fiction can be imagination stretching, it tends to be directed towards the world around us. However entertaining and imaginative a non-fiction text may be, its primary purpose – as we might expect – is to inform, describe or argue a case.
