Brian Selznick's the Invention of Hugo Cabret As a Mentor Text for Deep Reading in ELT

41 JANICE BLAND Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret as a Mentor Text for Deep Reading in ELT The format of the novel is evolving, as are the literacy needs of our students. Visual literacy, literary literacy, critical literacy and information literacy are competences that must be trained across the curriculum. Yet, it is undoubtedly the ELT classroom that offers most opportunities for this training due to the enormous diversity of Eng- lish-language texts. Now, in the 21st century, we can be sure that the majority of readers of narrative texts in English are not native speakers of English. While readers across the world are increasingly characterised by transculturality and hybrid cultural identity, literary texts are increasingly diverging from the monomodal novel format: "Literature and the other arts now consist of 'texts.' […] 'Text,' however, suggests something woven, textured, connected to strands that may lead beyond the single text to contexts, intertexts, and subtexts" (McGillis 2011, 349). The more complex, the more interwoven these multimodal texts are, the more opportunities arise in the classroom for talking around texts – leading to potential acquisition of multiple literacies through cognitively demanding, contemplative deep-reading processes. Deep reading, considered to be "slow and meditative" (Birkerts 1994, 146), goes beyond literary competence – such as recognising stylistic devices – to include, according to the contemporary understanding of teaching with texts, literary, visual and critical literacy: By deep reading, we mean the array of sophisticated processes that propel comprehension and that include inferential and deductive reasoning, analogical skills, critical analysis, reflection, and insight. The expert reader needs milliseconds to execute these processes; the young brain needs years to develop them. (Wolf and Barzillai 2009, 32) Deep reading, which can be developed in the classroom as a community literacy event, cannot be entirely separated from the sociocultural context of the event, just as the text itself reflects (and possibly attempts to rebel against) the sociocultural context in which it was created. We use our real-life experience to understand the narrative, while the storyworld itself helps illuminate and explain the real world. The engage- ment in deep reading is thus a two-way process: from life-to-text and from text-to- life. A literacy event in the classroom is social practice and process, and both cultural identity and ideology play important roles: "Today we accept that reading is an active process of making meaning and negotiating ideology within a social and cultural context" (Hutcheon 2015, 136). Due to this emphasis on negotiation, at least for educational purposes, the notion of teaching literacy in a collaborative sense, rather than teaching literature in a knowledge-transmission sense, is centrally important: "In teaching literacy, we are assuming a purpose or reason for reading; we are looking at reading as communication and at what readers will do with what they read – or what writers do with writing" (Paran and Wallace 2016, 442). In mother tongue education, this understanding of working with texts as commu- nal interpretation and reader response is increasingly accepted in classrooms. Howev- er, in ELT, there still seems to be a dominant belief among teachers and their students that there are absolute meanings in literary texts that must be taught: "In EFL text- Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 29.1 (March 2018): 41-53. Anglistik, Jahrgang 29 (2018), Ausgabe 1 © 2018 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) 42 JANICE BLAND books worldwide, the default position continues to be that of the text as 'container' of meaning and of the reader as a 'comprehender' who extracts meaning from texts" (Paran and Wallace 2016, 447). It can be argued that for ELT the training of deep reading is particularly important. On the one hand, visualising while reading is most difficult to attain but also most desirable in a second language: "The ability to turn words into mental images distinguishes deep reading with understanding and pleasure from merely decoding words on the page" (Bland 2013, 26). On the other hand, the acquisition of information literacy is most essential in English, the lingua franca of the Web: In the last few years, we've moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. […] The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need. (Gaiman 2013, n.p.) Comprehension questions are never the main point of a literacy event with a literary text, for unlike the reading of a school timetable or travel directions, understanding a literary text means taking part in a dynamic dialogue with the text. The need for a wider understanding of literacy is ever more apparent in the 21st century, with the hugely influential role of unsubstantiated claims often made through texts on social media, and the dangers of "a culture where a few claims on Twitter can have the same credibility as a library full of research" (Coughlan 2017). Consequently many educa- Winter Journals tors, particularly among those responsible for teacher education of ELT with young learners and teenagers, refer to multiple literacies – not only learning to read and write (functional literacy), but also learning to use the Web wisely and skilfully for information (information literacy), learning to read the aesthetic nature of Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) a literary text (literary literacy), learning to read all texts critically and understanding their manipu- lative power (critical literacy) and also reading pictures for information both deeply for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution and critically (visual literacy). The aim of teaching multiple literacies is reading at a deeper level. The preoccupation, at the time of writing, with the Trumpian vision of 'alternative facts' highlights the vital importance of both interpretation and comprehension – interpreting the choices made in verbal and visual text is essential for critical literacy. Particularly literary texts prompt the reader to consider deeply language formulations, connotations in verbal and pictorial text and cultural meanings. The Graphic Novel as a Multimodal Format Multiple literacy events are characterised by their highly collaborative and participa- tory nature, usually involving multimodal texts on page or screen. Discovering all of the details in the pictures requires careful re-readings, comparison of findings and associations, and revisiting the text for discrepancies and contradictions. Clearly this is rather easier to achieve with the frozen images of graphic novels and picturebooks than with the swiftly moving pictures of film. For the deep reading processes that are the subject of this article, the print medium is more able to offer mentor texts for slow and deliberate cognitive processes than digital media: Until sufficient proof enlarges the discussion, we believe that nothing replaces the unique contributions of print literacy for the development of the full panoply of the slower, constructive, cognitive processes that invite children to create their own whole worlds in what Proust called the "reading sanctuary." (Wolf and Barzillai 2009, 36) Anglistik, Jahrgang 29 (2018), Ausgabe 1 © 2018 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) BRIAN SELZNICK'S THE INVENTION OF HUGO CABRET 43 Although a graphic novel is a multimodal text in print medium, it can nonetheless connect the acquisition of literacies with the experience of digital natives, who of course are used to reading pictorial text alongside verbal text on the Web. Moreover graphic novels, once their complexities have been understood, can make reading a social event, just as comics do for younger children. Graphic novels can also make reading a pleasure, particularly for reluctant readers – generally the larger proportion of teen readers in ELT, as well as rather too many student teachers. Confident readers, on the other hand, may need to experience and discover the artistry of an excellent graphic novel, before being motivated to practise deep reading with this format. For in many countries, including Germany, it is widely believed that as children develop their literacy skills "sophistication in readers is demonstrated by reading words alone no longer accompanied by any images" (Aleixo and Norris 2010, 72). Due to the questionable content of many comics and graphic novels (not to mention novels and films), it is important to disassociate the format of graphic novels from the subject matter. However, when selecting a graphic novel for deep reading in an educational context, both format and content should be considered – in an ELT context they are both relevant for talking around texts. Oziewicz considers "the ability to distinguish genre from medium and format empowers young readers to better process new texts they encounter. On a more cognitively advanced level, it hones their critical literacy skills for identifying what the text seeks to achieve" (2018, in press). According to Oziewicz's definition, the graphic novel is a format, not a genre: "The format is the vehicle of the story's delivery, independent of content and type of narrative, which are described by the term genre" (2018, in press). Thus genre can be an adventure story, biography, a horror story and so forth, all of which exist as graphic novels. Reader Response and Cognitive Criticism The open nature of multimodal texts in the medium of print, beginning for young learners usually with high-quality picturebooks, means they provide an excellent opportunity for training readers in creative response and multiple literacies towards deep reading: "Being able to read is not the same as reading, which we see from nu- merous alarming reports from countries with high levels of literacy, but rapidly de- creasing levels of reading" (Nikolajeva 2014, 1).

Load more