ABSTRACT
Formulating a main idea is regarded as a vital comprehension skill because students need to understand a text in order to summarise the information. This chapter explores the four tasks resulted in the students ‘becoming literate’ through: purposeful reading and exploratory talk, efferent and aesthetic reading, the creation of an embodied text and the ‘reading’ of an embodied text. In the context of the classroom study, tableau became an informational and aesthetic text comprised of bodies synchronising meaning through selective poses. An important element of ‘becoming literate’ involves developing as readers and composers of text. Arising out of imagination, tableau reoriented the reading of informational text to become more than the identification of main ideas. The composition of tableau undergoes a process that is distinctively collaborative and akin to the process of written composition. The students who compose the text each bring their own ideas, imaginative capabilities and life experiences to the ‘drafting’ process, that is, rehearsal of tableau.
