ABSTRACT
It is important to remember that the ‘analysis’ of texts should not replace enjoyment and personal response. Many readers cite occasions when they felt they could have enjoyed a particular book but it was ‘done to death’ at school. Some people despised this kind of process so much that they never recovered a love of reading. Instead, textual analysis should be seen as a series of understandings, each offering the reader greater insight, greater pleasure and greater mastery over the written word:
In a book written for children, as in any other, we are primarily concerned with making sense of the text and the enjoyment and pleasure that doing so will give us. A good children’s book may convey layers of meaning, some of them beyond those immediately accessible to very young readers…
(Wilson, 1999:102)
Text-level work is quite different in nature to work at word level, and teachers need to be familiar with different concepts. Knowledge of cohesion , layout and textual organisation can help us to understand texts in different ways and to teach text-level work more effectively.
