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Children's Literature in Education

, Volume 44, Issue 2, pp 87–103 | Cite as

The Emergent Reader’s Working Kit of Stereotypes

  • Margaret Mackey
Original Paper
First Online:

Abstract

This article draws on a careful study of series fiction read in the 1950s to explore how stereotypes feature in the development of a young reader’s competence in learning to process stories in print. Five categories of stereotype are teased out: embodied stereotypes, understood through physical experience; working stereotypes, discerned through reading and then put to use over and over again in successive textual encounters; recurring stereotypes that appear in one book after another; transient stereotypes that are simply never remembered; and subliminal stereotypes that linger unvisited in the mind.

Keywords

Stereotypes Series fiction Reading processes Emergent readers 
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.School of Library and Information StudiesUniversity of AlbertaEdmontonCanada

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