My Friend Eeyore or to Be Like Coraline – Training in Reading Engagement

Socialization to reading in early childhood is necessary to make reading an obvious, giving pleasure activity. It can be strengthened through literary socialization, for example by reading together with caregivers, browsing through books and talking about them with the child as a pastime at home or in a kindergarten, playing pretend or make-believe games based on a text that was read, etc. The child should be an active participant in all strategies of socialization to reading – autonomous in evaluation and interpretation of the text. The studies on social reading attitudes and motivation prove that reading experiences build intrinsic motivation in reading. When reading is an important, attractive, obvious practice for children, their will to read comes from the conviction that reading brings pleasure and satisfaction, it means that they are intrinsically motivated to reading and they become engaged readers. The author of the paper will describe the process of socialization to reading based on emotions evoked during literary reading and responsible for improving reader’s Theory of Mind. Engagement will be also analyzed through emotions awakening during the reading process in relation to the literary characters, as well as the reader’s participation in the game designed by the plot’s author. Such emotions unleash cognitive processes, self-reference memory, and anticipation, such as figuring personality traits of a literary character, or free empathy-related emotions, for example wanting to become friends with a literary protagonist. Readers follow the narrator into a fictional world, which allows them to experiment with their own states of mind, train their empathy and identify with the character. Theoretical and empirical studies of reader’s response in the context of socialization to engagement in reading will be discussed in this paper.