ABSTRACT
In terms of literacy development, one of the primary tasks of a classroom teacher is to understand and extend children's responses to literary texts. The process begins in the early years of schooling and continues through the primary and secondary stages of education. Encouraging children to articulate their personal responses to literature is difficult to manage and achieve in large, mixedability classes where the range of literary competency among pupils covers a wide spectrum of aptitude and developmental levels. Katherine Paterson talks about fiction as being 'incarnational'. She explains that 'somehow the word or the idea has taken on flesh, has become physical, actual, and real’. The children's responses revealed their often sophisticated grasp of how deep structural devices in a novel operate – of how Bridge to Terabithia novel turns full circle and of how Jesse grows in stature and confidence as the book proceeds.
