Making sense of literature through story: Young Latinas using stories as meaning-making devices during literature discussions

Abstract

This teacher research study examines the use of stories told by five second grade Latinas as a means to gain an understanding of their lives and the literature they were reading and discussing during small group literature discussions. The questions guiding the research are (1) what stories do these Spanish-speaking girls bring from their lives to literature discussions and (2) how do these girls use their stories to make sense of literature? The study is based on a qualitative research design and is also phenomenological in that I wanted to understand how the children created meaning from the books we read and discussed and how their individual experiences shaped their understandings. Although there were a total of seven literature discussions held during the time of the study, I decided to focus on two of the discussions. Included in the analysis are profiles of each the five girls in the study, case studies of both literature discussions and Narrative Intertextual Analysis (NIA) Maps. Findings indicate that sharing their life stories during literature discussions gave the girls an opportunity to deliberately scrutinize the emotionally charged events in their lives that they chose to share through story. The life stories the girls shared helped them understand the book we were reading and also allowed them to step away from their lives, if only briefly, and reflect on, think about, and see connections between the events in their lives so far; the girls used stories as meaning-making devices.