English and Literacies Learning How to Make Meaning in Primary Classrooms

This chapter builds on Chapters 6 and 7 by exploring in more detail a range of concrete strategies and activities that teachers can introduce in the classroom to facilitate the deepening of learners’ understanding of different kinds of spoken, written, digital, multimodal and visual texts. In this chapter, we again refer to all kinds of texts (oral, written, digital and multimodal), so text is used here in its broadest sense. This chapter begins with a case study that illustrates how learners can respond to texts in creative ways facilitated by the class teacher. It moves to briefly examine reader response theory before exploring the importance of building learners’ understandings through talk and teacher modelling to ensure learners have both context and field knowledge. A range of classroom strategies and approaches are then considered that can facilitate different ways learners can respond to texts. Through such responses, learners can build critical understandings of texts that go beyond literal or surface comprehension. A particular emphasis is placed on metacognitive and creative arts-rich strategies that can be adapted for imaginative, instructional and information texts.