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A child learns about the complexity of text while reading a book containing multiple story threads and genres.
These things [the yellow sheets] are for telling you about the science. These ones [points to speech balloons] are for saying . . . telling you about the story.
The print that the kids write is all squiggly an' scraggly like handwriting, and the one that the author writes is . . . is on the computer.
A fact is something that's real, and what they were doing in the captions in this case was to speak, "I want my mommy." Well, that one's not-that's a caption too, but it's not coming out of the kid's mouth, it's-oh, it's a label.
These quotes are comments from readers that show their thinking about a multiple genre text, The Magic School Bus at the Waterworks by Joanna Cole (1986). We've examined the reading strategies of proficient and nonproficient readers in our research to show how they are able to construct meaning as they transact with complex texts that contain multiple story threads and genres. In this article, we analyze one fourth grader's reading and retelling to demonstrate how he learns about the complexity of the text while he reads. We first analyze the text, then his reading, and conclude with a discussion about the importance of understanding what a reader learns through transaction with a well-written complex text.
Zachary is a prime example of the readers we have studied to document their active learning experiences as they transact with an unfamiliar text. Zachary was a fourth grader considered by many, including his teacher and his mother, to be a "struggling" reader. We place the term "struggling" in quotes to indicate our tentativeness with the meaning ofthat term. As a result of our work with Zachary and other readers, we have learned that a struggle with a text serves to challenge readers and can "teach" readers to use reading strategies more efficiently (Meek, 1988). From our perspective, the struggle with a text is something that can be valued and used to help readers become more proficient. We have come to understand that:
* Struggling readers make sense of complex texts.
* In the retelling of a complex text, the...