ABSTRACT
Encouraging children to talk about their personal reading experiences with other readers has been acknowledged, through the inspiration and crusading zeal of educationalists such as Aidan Chambers, as a prerequisite of good classroom practice. The responses of the younger group bore out W. Iser's theory that a literary text is 'something of an arena in which the reader and the author engage in a game of the imagination'. Sharing responses to literature is one of the most meaningful ways in which good listening and good talking can be achieved. Iser's study of the phenomenology of reading and the subsequent work of Aidan Chambers establish frameworks of reference for examining the responses of the children who shared Rose Blanche. Roberto Innocenti established the focus for his own partially understood childhood experience in the fictional experiences of the child Rose Blanche. In Innocenti's picture book, the inhumanity and sadism that prevailed during the Nazi occupation are seen from a child's perspective.
