ABSTRACT
This chapter presents and analyses two examples of classroom discourse between a teacher and a small group of pupils in primary schools. The size of the groups and the age of the pupils were similar, and both groups were taking part in focused comprehension discussions on the topic of texts which they had just read, during guided reading sessions within the tightly prescribed parameters of the literacy hour. An important question raised by the author's analysis was the appropriateness of comprehension exercises based on a forced-choice task structure where the text in question is a literary one. In both sequences, the teacher and pupils were discussing texts belonging to the genre of short narrative fiction. The author suggests that the critical understanding and appreciation of literary texts is a cultural practice which can, and should, be deliberately taught in schools, but that crucially it needs to be seen as a non-algorithmic form of knowledge.
