Voice and Role in Reading and Writing

Author(s): Myra Barrs

Source: Language Arts , February 1987, Vol. 64, No. 2, Empowerment (February 1987),
pp. 207-218
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41961593

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Voice and Role in Reading and
Writing

Myra Barrs

Some time ago I began to write poetry: something that I had not done since
adolescence. The first poem that came surprised me; it was not in my own
voice. I was excited by the liberating effect of this, and began to experiment
with the possibilities of composing in other voices. I began also to reflect on
the quantity of writers who had regularly taken on other personae, and
seemed to have enjoyed the freedom this had brought. T.S. Eliot was the su-
preme example, a great orchestrator of voices. But there were many others,
including a number of modern novelists who were using the technique of a
succession of interlocking narratives. Of these, Doris Lessing's recent science
fiction work Canopus in Argos , in which some books are written in a succes-
sion of different roles, had particularly impressed me.
I had been interested for some time in the whole question of role. Drama
opens up a new range of language for children, a much wider range than that
available to them in daily life. I had been fortunate enough to spend a certain
amount of time with Dorothy Heathcote and had been fascinated by the va-
riety of voices and viewpoints that the children and adults in her dramas
proved capable of taking on. There seemed to be connections between this
kind of drama and the roles taken up in writing - and in reading too. Central
to all of them seemed to be the idea of enactment.

Voice and Role in Reading

Dorothy Heathcote's dramas make a highly developed use of people's every-

day powers of roletaking. In early dramatic play, of course, children take up
and abandon a whole series of roles with ease. And as adults, in our daily
lives, we are used to shifting our roles according to our social context. Heath-
cote sees roletaking as something accessible to everyone, but draws a clear
distinction between roletaking and acting. When we are in role, according to
her definition, we are still recognizably ourselves. We have not stepped out of

Acknowledgements: I should like to acknowledge the work and cooperation of the following
teachers, schools, and children: Wembley Junior School, London; Wembley High School, Lon-
don; Cathy MacDonald and her class at Leopold Primary School, London; John Hardcastle and
his class at Hackney Downs School, London; and the students and staff at Parkside Collegiate,
Elgin County, Ontario

Language Arts , Volume 64 , Number 2, February 1987 207

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208 Language Arts

our own personalities into the personality of the character in a drama, as an

actor does. We have simply assumed a role.
Heathcote emphasizes the ordinariness of this achievement, and the con-
tinuity between everyday experience and dramatic experience. Of reading,
she writes:

We all dramatise, whatever our age or intelligence, each time we read a book,
for we become lost in the adventures or thoughts expressed in the story or the
personalities. An ex-soldier reading The Naked and the Dead in this respect will
be having the same experiences as a child reading about The Little Red Engine.
He will be entering another world voluntarily for a space of time. . . .

If we consider what is involved in reading aloud, the links between reading

and enactment are apparent. The fullest 'reading' of a text, in the literary
critical sense, is surely that which indicates most precisely and sensitively how
it should be read aloud. The end result of textual elucidation or analysis, or
of critical appreciation will generally be an enhanced sense of the voice of a
text, and of its rhythms and tunes, even if these are only experienced inter-
nally and not actually enacted.
In the early stages of learning to read, Don Holdaway's term for emergent
readers' approximations to a known text is "reenactments." In The Founda-
tions of Literacy he gives a series of examples of such early 'readings' includ-
ing one of a two-year-old child, David, reenacting P. D. Eastman's Are You
My Mother? Holdaway convincingly shows that David is enacting the meaning
of the text in the fullest possible way, with all the resources available to him,
despite the limitations of his linguistic range. At one point the text reads:

He looked up. He did not see her.

He looked down. He did not see her.

David's rendering of this is:

Her look up, look down, see her (plus shake of head).

Though David does not yet seem to have the language of negation, he is us-
ing the means that he has to express his understanding of the text, and en-
acting the meaning physically.
These two examples, like those given by Dorothy Heathcote, seem to me
alike in their illustration of what it is we do when we read. Whether we read
aloud or silently, in some way we enact, or perform, the text. The fullest read-
ing is that which allows the text to come alive most fully. And when a text
does live, it lives through us.
Georges Poulet's account of reading makes this point best. Poulet de-
scribed readers as allowing the consciousness of the writer to exist through
their consciousness ("In reading we must think the thoughts of someone
else") and concluded that while this was happening, the reader's own life was
suspended. He saw the life of the text as taking over the reader's life for the

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 Voice and Role in Reading and Writing 209

duration of the reading: "A work of art becomes (at the expense of the
reader, whose own life it suspends) a sort of human being." Many readers
have described this experience; here is one child's account of what seems to
happen when she reads (quoted from The Climate for Learning ):

Now I am on library books I enjoy them very much the reason is because when
I read a feeling of sadness and happyness go's through my mind and body mak-
ing sound unhearable the onley things I can see or hear are the things in the
book when I am reading.

Poulet was talking about silent reading. When we read aloud, of course,
we lend the text not only our consciousness but, actually, our breath. And
whether we read aloud or read silently we take on the voice of the text, slip-
ping into it as if it were a cloak held ready for us to put on, a temporary iden-
tity, in other words, a role. Just as in roletaking we assume a role while
remaining unmistakably ourselves, so in reading we assume the voice of the
text, tuning our own voice to its demands.
When, of course, (as in all the examples so far given) the texts we read are
stories in which narration alternates with passages of dialogue, it is interest-
ing to note that the dialogue parts actually are drama - moments of full
drama in the recollected drama of narration. The tense structure of dialogue
is based on the present, whereas for narration there is "a whole tense system
peculiar to narrative (based on the aorist [past definite tense]) designed to
wipe out the present of the speaker" (Barthes). In stories, then, at the mo-
ments of greatest drama, the present tense of dialogue breaks through, so to
speak, the controlling past tense of narrative.

Voice and Role in Writing

In reading, then, we enact or perform a text, aloud or silently, using for this
purpose our ordinary powers of roletaking. In writing, on the other hand, we
create texts for performance, or write scripts to be performed by the reader.
The writer's "sense of a reader" can be seen as having something in common
with a dramatist's sense of an actor. The writer/dramatist is concerned to en-
sure that the reader/actor reads the text as it is meant to be read. The elab-
orate markings and inversions of written language are all devices for ensuring
that meanings which in the spoken language are conveyed by pause, pitch,
and intonation, are felt, and can be reproduced by, the reader. Punctuation,
viewed in this light, has something of the function of stage directions.
Here is an example of a "text for performance" written by a thirteen-year-
old boy. It is fairly obviously pastiche, a kind of mixture of James Bond sit-
uation and Len Deighton narrative style, all done with a great deal of nar-
rative energy:

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210 Language Arts

The car started to speed up in less than ten seconds. In no time we were
doing at least forty or fifty miles an hour. The lady sitting next to me revealed
herself, "I am Madam Fairycake." I laughed put nobody else seemed to find it
amiseng. Suddenly we stopped violently. "Sheep crossing the road madam,"
said a voice over the intercom, obviously it was the chauffeur, or was it?
"Do you drink?" said Madam Fairycake "Yes I do," said I. "A dry martini
all right?" "With a slice of lemon on the rocks of course," "Oh! Of course," I
said in a very suphisticated tone of voice. I sipped quietly. "Goodbye Mr John-
son, Goodby. HA!HA!HA!"
The next thing I new I was in the living room of a very expensive mansion.
Sitting next to me with a silver plate in front of her was the devil it's self.
"Madam Fairycake," I said in a very surprised voice. She laught a loud, hu-
morous, booking common laugh. "What is so funny?" I said. "My name is not
Madam Fairycake, it is the late Mrs Wicked".
"The Late Mrs Wicked?" I siad very surprised,
"I am."
Then all of the sudden she vanished into thin air.

When I first read this story, I was struck by two things. First of all, I was
impressed by the way that this writer was attempting to work in a particular
genre. It was obvious that some aspects of the genre were presenting him
with problems - the suppression of various connecting elements in the narra-
tive, for instance, had not quite worked - but, despite this, the whole story
had enormous verve. Second, I was interested by what I took to be the writ-
er's obvious concern for punctuation. In his handwritten version of this text,
the punctuation marks are oversized; they stand out very importantly on the
paper. I thought that this might indicate a particular awareness on his part of
the need to mark a text for the reader.
In interview, Peter referred to the fact that he liked to suppress elements
of a narrative and let the reader do the work: "Sometimes I do stories and
leave it for someone that's reading it to fill in what happens at the end." He
thought that this narrative technique was derived from his experience of tele-
vision, than from his reading. It would, of course, be interesting to speculate
about the effects of cinematic and television narrative on written narrative.
About punctuation he said: "I try to think of things and put them in punc-
tuation. But sometimes I write it and people don't read it like I write it - I
think different to what they read it." The need to ensure that people read
things as you write them was important to him, and he was clear that punc-
tuation was one of the main resources he had to influence the reader's
"reading."
This was a conscious young writer at work, aware of how, as a writer, he
himself took on the voices of different kinds of stories, and also of how he
could direct readers to perform his texts. But much younger writers take up
roles in their writing, and "try on" a particular style or genre. The following
example is from a story written by a group of ten-year-old boys and girls who
had built a miniature battleground on a tabletop in their classroom, had

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 Voice and Role in Reading and Writing 211

acted out a war adventure story with plastic toy soldiers, and had taken pho-
tographs of key moments in the story. The text was written afterwards, to ac-
company the pictures:

ATTACK

Phase One

Action force prepare for battle. Baron Iron Blood is trying to conquer the
world and the Force are planning to stop him. It will be a difficult task because
Iron Blood is so powerful. He has millions of Red Shadow fighters and a great
deal of ammunition together with advanced transportation. His Red Shadows
will stop at nothing. They only obey the orders of Iron Blood himself and the
Black Major.
Force are feeling confident as they prepare for battle.
Phase Two

The battle track sets off for revenge. A Red Shadow begins to run for his life
when he sees the huge monster tank approaching. But he is not fast enough.
The tank crushes him like a mill stone crushing wheat.

This extract is a remarkable example of children using linguistic resources

that are not generally tapped in a classroom. The genre is obviously that of
action comics, and the writers here demonstrate perfect control of a particu-
lar kind of narrative. Everything about it - the urgency of the historic present
(appropriate to the comic format), the clipped, tough, sentences, the delib-
erately pared-down style in which the one metaphor stands out so strik-
ingly - is impressively authentic.
The passage is an excellent example of what can be achieved by children
using their natural powers of imitation. It goes without saying that some or
all of the children who were involved in this project had a great deal of ex-
perience, as readers, of similar texts. Their unconsciously acquired, stored
knowledge of the genre is what enables them to reproduce its tone so accu-
rately. They have taken on the voice of the genre and could thus be said to be
in some sense "in role." No doubt the fact that they actually enacted the
story before they wrote it, using the toy figures, helped them to tune up for
the writing itself.

"Drama on Paper"

One name for what is happening here might be "drama on paper." Dorothy
Heathcote's teaching first alerted me to the possibilities of this kind of writ-
ing. It was obvious that children taking part in her dramas were able to access
linguistic registers that they might not normally be expected to be able to use.
Heathcote, who often uses a "classic" style in her drama, is able to summon
children into an area of language which is quite removed from everyday
speech, but which they seem perfectly at home in.

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212 Language Arts

It was also clear that, once roles were established, children could sustain
them just as well on paper. Here are two examples, both from work based on
the poem Ozymandias . The first is an extract from a report written by a
group of ten-year-old children who had been taking part in a drama. They
had all taken double roles, first as archeologists researching an ancient cul-
ture, then as members of the vanished civilization reenacting some of the
events that the archeologists had found evidence of. The following piece of
writing is an extract from a contemporary record, of the kind that the histo-
rians of the culture might have written and the archeologists might have
discovered:

In the time of the fifth king it was decided that the royal princess should marry
the prince from over the sea in the hope that it would bring peace to both lands.
War threatened because of the way we worshipped our gods. We had the same
faith but worshipped in different ways. Our friends from the sea escorted the
princess to the prince.

The second example is a group of extracts from work done by Canadian

high school students (aged fourteen). No actual drama preceded this writing,
but in the planning discussions that led up to it, we had talked about Ozy-
mandias' empire, its rise and fall, and the circumstances that might have sur-
rounded these events. Then the students, working in groups, chose positions
that they might have held in that empire, and wrote in their chosen roles, first
in the voice of an official public document, and then as private persons.
An extract from an official proclamation:
In the name of Ozymandias the all mighty King, I hereby proclaim that all the
land west of the dead lands is now officially property of the all mighty King
Ozymandias. Any dispute of this will be dealt with with great severity, hence-
forth destroying both life and property of any and all the disputants.
A teacher writes:

His time as a leader is a great dominion for all; our wars are won, our land is
free, and all is prosperous, none can be destroyed.
A tax inspector:
Each person or dependant owning land or valuables shall be taxed according to
amount owned. . . . Anyone refusing this order will be punished in such a way
as by: house and land be confiscated including furniture and valuables.
A military adviser writes in his diary:
But today at noon worship I saw a peddler trying to cut Ozymandias up into
little threads by the free word of speech - he was still yelling absurd quotes
about the way our King is ruling the kingdom.

Particularly interesting here is the way in which in these writings, as in

drama, children and students can sustain an unfamiliar register, even when
they have to adapt or invent appropriate forms of language to do so. Their
inventions are often very happy ones, as in "trying to cut Ozymandias up into
little threads by the free word of speech." Clearly the basis for all this con-

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 Voice and Role in Reading and Writing 213

fident invention is that they are writing out of a strongly imagined situation
and in a personally chosen role.
This kind of drama on paper, which draws on some of the same powers as
full drama, is, like full drama, an extension of early enactment and make-be-
lieve play. Vygotsky points out in Mind and Society (1978) that the mental act
of imagining begins as physical activity (being a horse, a mummy, or a king):

Imagination is a new psychological process for the child; it is not present in the
consciousness of the very young child, is totally absent in animals, and repre-
sents a specifically human form of conscious activity. Like all functions of con-
sciousness, it originally arises from action. The old adage that child's play is
imagination in action must be reversed: we can say that imagination in adoles-
cents and school children is play without action.

In dramatic play, of course, language is generated through action and in-

teraction as in life. Children assume the body language, facial expression,
and tone of voice of their roles, and this kind of physical tuning-up is ob-
viously important, a way of getting into the right linguistic gear. It seems to
me unlikely that, in later mental imagining or play, imagination loses all con-
tact with physical action. Some residual physical activity, in the form of min-
ute bodily adjustments, seem likely to accompany any attempt to take on a
role in writing, as in a way of getting physically in tune for the performance.
More about the interesting but hidden subject of the ways in which "the body
thinks" can be found in D.W. Harding's essay on "The Hinterland of
Thought."
Obviously the most important aspect of any form of roletaking is that it
gives access to other experiences. But for my purposes in this article, I want
to concentrate on the fact that it also gives access to linguistic resources that
might never otherwise be tapped. A particularly striking example of this ef-
fect and, I think, of the physical "tuning-up" which I described above, occurs
in a transcript which John Hardcastle has kindly allowed me to use, and
which will require a little contextualization.
The following extracts come from the transcript of an English lesson at
Hackney Downs School, London. One of the students, Andrew, had written
a poem in Caribbean dialect called Record Shop in Birmingham. A group of
his friends were helping him to "translate" the poem into standard English as
a linguistic exercise. The extracts I want to focus on come from the part of
the transcript where the boys are trying to put a negative verb form into stan-
dard. One boy, Ken, tries to read the poem through from the beginning and
transpose it as he goes along. He gets stuck on the expression "he never had
none," knows that there is something wrong with it, but can't pin down what
it is:

Ken : (reads) "I went into a record shop in Birmingham to hear some mu-
sic. ..."

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214 Language Arts

Teacher : Can we shush. . . .

Ken: "... but the records they had were out of date ... I looked round,
there I saw my friend Glyn. He had a couple of records in his hand so
I asked him for some money. He said he never had none" - ah that
sounds wrong . . . Oh, am I being taped ... oh God.
Teacher: No, let's do it properly because . . . you were just going to say some-
thing, go on, finish what you were gonna do.
Ken: "So finally. ..."
Teacher: Just a second . . . that's where you left off . . . right, "So I asked him
for some money ..."
Ken: "So I asked him for some money . . . mmm ... an' he said that he
never had none." Nah, that don't really go in proper English, does it?
What do you think, Junior?
Junior: See ... ah ... I never thought there was nothing wrong with it.

It's clear from the form of his reply why Junior would never have thought
there was nothing wrong with Ken's attempt. But Ken is not satisfied, and a
little later on in the transcript he has an idea ("this is the only way").
He starts to read the poem through again from the beginning, assuming an
exaggerated middle-class white voice. The teacher encourages him in this
("Try reading it posh") and, as he reads, the negative form that had been giv-
ing him all the trouble is smoothed out effortlessly into a standard, or even
hyper-standard negative:

Ken: . . . Yeh, that's true, you know, this is the only way - if I started to
read . . . (in an affected middle-class voice) "I went into the record
shop ..."
Teacher: Read it like that . . . just try like that ... try reading it posh ... try
reading it posh . . . and see where it goes wrong . . . just a sec-
ond . . .

Ken: All right!

Teacher: Take it nice and steady, come on . . .
Ken: "I went into a record shop in Birmingham to hear some music, but it
was a bit out of date. Then I saw my friend Glyn. He had a couple of
records in his hand so I asked him for some money. He said he had
none, so I finally I asked him if he had any lovers' rock, then he played
some. Then I started to chat to my friend. He said that he was going
down Ferricks tonight. Ferricks is a club for rastas, they usually go
there ..." (collapses laughing) ... I can't take no more ... no
man!

Ken collapses at the point where the contradiction between the content of
what he is saying and the manner in which he is saying it becomes too ex-
treme. Later, when the boys discussed this same passage with their teacher,
they finally arrived at "he didn't have any" as a preferred form. The "posh"
form "he had none" was discarded, perhaps even temporarily forgotten, as
soon as the posh accent was abandoned.

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 Voice and Role in Reading and Writing 215

I find this whole transcript an exciting example of the way in which role-
taking can activate linguistic knowledge which might otherwise remain un-
used. It seems to me that once such usually tacit knowledge has been
activated in this way it ought to be possible for it to be progressively reacti-
vated until it can be consciously used. Or again, it may be possible through
discussion and reflection (such as might arise from listening to a tape or mak-
ing a transcript) to bring this kind of knowledge within the conscious control
of the speaker/writer.
This raises interesting questions. It implies, for instance, what some teach-
ers know - that for many children the best route into certain linguistic regis-
ters (especially those such as formal standard forms which are not part of
their active linguistic repertoire, or that of anyone they know) may be
through drama, role play, or writing in role, rather than through any kind of
direct language instruction or exercise. This kind of approach would be mak-
ing use of children's positive strengths as language users - their sensitivity to
the workings of language, and their powers of inductive learning in real lan-
guage contexts. Drama and role play make it possible to take on this kind of
new knowledge in an active way and in a meaningful context. Very often they
simply allow children to try out language of which they already have consid-
erable stored (unconscious) knowledge, and which can be activated by the
demands of a real language situation.
Drama and role play, then, draw on a fundamental mode of learning, the
ability to learn through enactment. It would be useful at this point to unpack
the word enactment, and to examine the two powerful concepts that it com-
bines. Enactment is both action and symbolization. It is thus a pivotal sym-
bolic category and learning mode, drawing on both the individual's powers of
social action and on the normal capacity for playing and imagining. This is
probably why Vygotsky saw play as "a major source of development" for the
preschool child. He considered, however, that for the school child play be-
came "a more limited form of activity, predominantly of the athletic type."
But it is clear, I think, that intelligent use of drama in education can tap into
precisely the same capacity to develop through play that children make such
constant use of in their own early learning. Understandings generated in this
way can subsequently be internalized and used.
This is also the way in which children could most easily acquire that con-
trol of different genres which Gunther Kress, in Learning to Write, rightly
sees as one of the marks of a mature writer. Kress stresses that writers have
to learn to use larger syntactic structures such as genre and other textual
structures beyond the sentence, as well as smaller textual units such as sen-
tences and clauses. But though Kress believes that genre, like other aspects
of written language, needs to be explicitly taught, it seems obvious that in
reality children derive most of their knowledge of written language, including
their knowledge of genre, from their reading. Kress acknowledges that this

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216 Language Arts

happens (". . . children pick up the requirements of the different genres by

osmosis, as it were"), but seems to regard it as an unsatisfactory hit-and-miss
process.
Kress is particularly concerned that children are not being directly taught
the impersonal genres that are important for information writing, topic work,
and formal essays. Yet if children's reading experiences of informational
prose were as extensive and received as much support as their reading of fic-
tion, they would presumably be able to move gradually into such genres with-
out any direct instruction. They would have internalized the 'voice' of this
kind of text. Kress does not seem to see how normal the process of learning
to write can be, not to appreciate that written language, like spoken lan-
guage, is on the whole acquired inductively, rather than explicitly taught and
learned.

Role of the Writer and of the Audience

Drama, however, which enables children to use a broader linguistic range,

gives them experience of extended utterance, and places them in role as peo-
ple with different perspectives on the world, may also be an important way
into certain unfamiliar genres. Writing in role could also provide a means of
taking on a particular stance as a writer. Here is an example of some science
fiction writing by a nine-year-old boy who, in this piece, has clearly moved
into role as a scientific writer, and achieved a significant measure of control
of a deliberately impersonal genre.

Haffagon
The planit from spase lookes quit hospitapal. But that is cayst by it's thick cloud
layer. But wene you have penitrated the elode lare, it is a plesent planet 38°C
1°C over the normal body temprecher. The planet is green for a bout 2/4, 1/4 is
H209C2 which is wasoter Luckley it is safe for pepel to drink. But the remanin
1/4 is red this is caust by a dises caled ce-mon-frch-he-mhars-ca-clone-pon-nash-
agon. The simtons are: the pashenťs brane is taken over, a plant start's to
growe out of the pashenťs head.
They have to be terminated.

It is clear that as well as taking on the language of this kind of writing, the
writer has also taken on a certain way of looking. His achievement is more
than linguistic; he has been thinking as a scientist might think. It has some-
times been assumed that children of this age are not sufficiently mature to
handle non-narrative factual writing. Examples like this show that it is not
necessarily anything inherent in the genre which presents young writers with
a problem. They may, however, find it difficult to handle forms of this kind if
they are not in full control of the facts they are dealing with or only just be-
ginning to organize what they know in an abstract, logical way. Here the
writer is working with 'facts' of his own invention, and the essentially playful

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 Voice and Role in Reading and Writing 217

nature of the situation gives him full control of his material. His tone reflects
his sense of confidence.
Role can, therefore, provide a helpful way into new linguistic registers, by
enabling them to be practised and internalized in a context of play. Writing in
role can also provide one way of solving a perennial problem attached to
school writing - the absence of a real audience. We have become acutely
aware in recent years of the role of audience in shaping a piece of writing,
and of the need to find audiences for school writing other than the teacher.
But it is possible that role might serve as an alternative (and sometimes a
more accessible alternative) to audience as a way of giving focus to a piece of
writing.
I can best describe what I mean this way. I write 'in role' pretty well every
day, my role being that of a local government officer. One way of describing
what I do when I write in this way would be to say that I am aware of an au-
dience, an audience of other officers, politicians, and teachers in my local ed-
ucation authority. But I believe that what I actually do in such writing is to
slip into an accustomed role. The language of the role is the language of com-
mittee reports, formal letters, and official memoranda, and the voice is one
that I have come to take on through my reading of such documents.
Role is another way of focusing - of taking up an attitude to your material.
Either a clear role or a clear sense of audience is needed for a writer to have
a starting point, a reason for making a selection from their data. What both
offer is a viewpoint, an angle from which to make the selection.
It is hard to provide real audiences for school writing and despite many ex-
citing examples of school 'publishing' it remains true that much writing done
in school will be writing which is audience-less and which is done primarily
for the teacher or, of course, for the self, as a means of learning. But role
could offer children much more frequently a way into all kinds of uses of
written language; an opportunity to write as a historian, an anthropologist,
or a scientist. Moreover, because it draws on ways of learning that are truly
basic - play, enactment, dramatizing - it is possible that role offers a more
generally accessible route to certain kinds of language uses, particularly im-
personal genres and written standard forms that are educationally valued,
than any route which involves direct instruction. The possibilities it offers of
empowering children, or rather of allowing them to use powers that they nat-
urally possess, have only begun to be explored.

References

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Barthes. London: Fontana, 1977.
Harding, D. W "The Hinterland of Thought." In Experience into Words, edited by
• D. W. Harding. London: Chatto & Windus, 1963.

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218 Language Arts

Heathcote, D. "Drama as Challenge." In Dorothy Heathcote, edited by L. Johnson

and C. O'Neill. London: Hutchinson, 1984.
Heathcote, D. "Drama as Context for Talking and Writing." In Drama as Context, D.
Heathcote. Sheffield: National Association for the teaching of English, 1980.
Holdaway, D. The Foundations of Literacy. Gosford, N. S. W: Ashton Scholastic,
1979.

Kress, G. Learning to Write. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982.

Lessing, D. Shikasta. London: Jonathon Cape, 1979. This is the first of a series of
novels with the overall title Canopus in Argos: Archives.
Poulet, G. "Phenomenology of Reading." Quoted in W. Iser, The Implied Reader.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.
Torbe, M., and P. Medway. The Climate for Learning. London: Ward Lock Educa-
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Vygotsky, L. Mind in Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.

My ra Barrs directs the Centre for Language in Primary Education for the
Inner London Education Authority in Britain .

Photo Credit: Nancy Nicolescu

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