A New Literature Companion for Teachers

Children’s literature is in a golden age, with a never-before seen range of forms, modes and styles. This is exciting for teachers, who understand the power of literature to inspire readers and writers in the classroom. This brand-new, third edition of PETAA’s landmark text, A New Literature Companion, has been written to support and build teachers’ knowledge of how literature may be responded to, examined, interpreted, analysed, evaluated and created. Written in alignment with the latest version of the Australian Curriculum: English (v9) and including more than 80 mentor texts, this is a must-have for any initial teacher education (ITE) student or practising teacher library.

A Literature Companion for Teachers presents literary writing as both an art and a craft and explores aspects of the craft of writers’ artistry. Throughout the chapters, this text highlights the reciprocity of the reading- writing relationship, highlighting close reading and developed writing teaching and learning opportunities for teachers and students. There is a consistent focus on how language constructs meaning in texts.

In this new edition of A Literature Companion for Teachers, a new chapter, Teaching mentor texts, draws out the nuances of working with texts in this specific context. The book expands its discussion of literary genres and now includes sections on Spiritual Realism, Magical Realism and Climate Sci-fi (or Cli-fi). The book now also examines Postmodern texts, Graphic, Verse novels, Manga, and renews its focus on Non-fiction. Figurative language and Poetry are now examined as a natural pair, and the book considers additional relevant examples for teachers from fiction and non-fiction prose. Chapter 6, Reading and viewing picturebooks, makes stronger links between verbal and visual texts to teach inferencing, interpretative and analytic reading skills.