Entry #4: Chidren's Book Comprehension for ELA Students

            While children’s books strive to have universal appeal, oftentimes cultural biases emerge and are detrimental to a young reader’s comprehension.  In looking at two children’s books, Marc Brown’s Arthur’s April Fool and Jon Scieszka & Lane Smith’s The Stinky Cheese Man and other Fairly Stupid Tales, several cultural elements in both stories reflect the dominant American culture and would give ELA students some difficulty.  Oftentimes, I’m afraid these cultural biases are overlooked, and the barriers to story comprehension are only increased.

Arthur’s April Fool
            In Arthur’s April Fool (Brown, 1983), there are many cultural references that American readers take for granted as universally understood.  First and foremost, the idea of April Fool’s Day and all of the pranks involved would be lost on many ELA kids.  While the idea of April Fool’s Day is primarily European-based, there are many cultures that embrace this good-hearted pranking on different occasions.  For instance, Spanish-speaking countries enjoy a day of pranks in December, and Iranians have a similar holiday in April.  Before reading the story to the group, a teacher would be smart to elicit from students some ideas about practical jokes and explicitly explain what happens on April Fool’s Day. 
            Another issue in the story relates to the picture cues not matching the ideas in the text.  For instance, Arthur and his friend Buster are trying on a series of April Fool’s Day disguises, but none of the disguises pictured in a comic-style series on the left page match the written descriptions of their disguises at all.     The word “telescope” pops up in the story several times, but it isn’t pictured until the end.  While the telescope is something fairly visually recognizable, providing an extra visual for ELA students earlier would help with the story’s foreshadowing for the final April Fool’s telescope prank. 
            There were also several size references to the book’s Bully, Binky Barnes, as “King Kong” and “Godzilla.”  While the illustrations portray Binky as much larger than the other children, these allusions to famous characters would likely be lost on a student new to English.  Placing students in group settings for discussion/storymapping, kids could help each other by explaining and describing these characters.  
             A couple of vocabulary words are dated and Euro-centric, and their pronunciation and meaning would be unclear to a reader.  The character Binky often refers to the other children as “twerps” and “pipsqueaks.”  Here would be an opportunity to integrate discussion of what students hear on the playground—they could substitute more current/relevant words to enhance Binky’s menacing and bullying demeanor to give the story greater meaning.  Again, familiarizing the students with the vocabulary terms and their meanings in advance would help make this character more realistic to the students, and it would ultimately help them be in on the joke Arthur plays on Binky at the end of the story (blacking his eyes with ink on a prank telescope).

The Stinky Cheese Man and other Fairly Stupid Tales

            Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith (1992) present a wonderful tongue-in-cheek look at common European-based fairy tales with The Stinky Cheese Man, but a lot of their structure, humor, and format would be extremely confusing to an ELA student.  The first thing I would suggest to a teacher of ELA students would be to take this book in small pieces before reading the entire collection of stories to the class.  As the stories are sarcastic and irreverent looks at stories many of us grew up memorizing, many ELA students won’t see the humor or the variation, and a lot of the fun of the book would be lost on them.  It would instead be helpful for a teacher to expose students to the traditional telling of the story(ies) first and then pair it/them with the corresponding excerpt(s) from The Stinky Cheese Man.  Since several characters flit from story to story, perhaps this book would be most appreciated at the end of a unit on fairy tales.  
          Another issue that is fun for an adult or fluent English reader is the structure of the book itself—the end papers appear in the middle of the story, the dedication page is upside down, and the table of contents (that doesn’t line up with actual pages) doesn’t appear until after the first story.  The attempt at irreverence and humor through this unusual formatting technique would just come off as confusing to English language learners who have been expected to master the traditional Western method of reading a text.  Here, the author’s approach and intent of Jack the story’s misbehaving narrator, would have to be taught explicitly. 
           Beginning with small groups would be a nice way of integrating this text into the classroom.  The traditional Western fairy tales could be divided out in groups to jigsaw the material, and students would have to present/retell/teach the class the story.  Then, the class would take a look at each specialized story from The Stinky Cheese Man to compare.  These would be great stories for spurring on discussions in group or large-class settings, and eventually, students could create their own fractured fairy tales. 
           Another great extension piece with this text would involve students finding their favorite parables (preferably from their home culture) to teach the class.  Then, the class could make a compilation book of international fairy tales and their creative variations.