ABSTRACT
As a very young child listening to stories read by his mother, Sartre tried to explain to himself what was happening. His mother lowered her eyes, appeared to fall asleep and used unfamiliar language with confidence. Who was speaking? And to whom? Sartre’s conclusion was that when reading to him his mother acted as a medium, and that the book was speaking through her. When alerted by Elizabeth Plackett to this remarkable insight in Sartre’s account of his early development as a reader and writer in Les Mots (1964), my decision to investigate young children’s understanding of the reading process was confirmed. I hoped to find out more about what young children (3-and 4-year-olds) think the act of reading entails and how they think fluent readers process print. Having worked with young children for many years, I was quite aware that insights like Sartre’s may only be momentary, and that children’s perceptions of such a complex process are likely to be shifting and changing all the time. In her essay The Development of Initial Literacy, Yetta Goodman (1984) describes children’s active search for understanding.
