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owlectomyThis merits a NYTimes article? Junie B. Jones series criticized for not upholding correct grammar!.
I happen to like Junie B... if only by comparison to the dreck that is most early chapter books. The books are funny and they have a very real voice. I don't have the desire to read more than one all the way through--but somehow it often happens that I find myself near one, reading a chapter or two and wanting to know what comes next.
It's worth considering that the children of first-generation immigrants often grow up to speak perfect English without so much as an accent. If your mother and your father will not prevent you from acquiring all the normal grammar of English... will a fictional character with a 26-book empire really do that much harm? Really?
In fact, much of the humor in the books wouldn't work if the reader wasn't expected to notice Junie B.'s mistakes and find them funny. Yes, a five-year-old or six-year-old child may still be making some of these mistakes; but that's the distinction between competence and performance. You may know how to conjugate a Spanish verb; when you're in the midst of a conversation, however, your brain might not have the spare processor cycles to devote to that conjugation when you're just trying to make yourself understood. (There's a good bit of second-language-acquisition research on this; a speaker may be perfectly able to make a distinction on a test, or while writing an essay, but fail when it comes to speaking, because you don't have the time to edit yourself). One kind of pleasure in reading is pleasure at one's superiority: you know more than the character, you recognize that the character is being wrong or silly. The Junie B. books play on that pleasure in their plotlines, so doesn't it make sense that they would do the same thing with the prose?
The naysayers do have a point; it's harder to decode incorrectly spelled words than correctly spelled ones. But children are going to have to deal with this even if they don't read Junie B. Jones; they're going to be passing notes or IMs to each other, after all.
The children who aren't reading Junie B. are reading formulaic easy-readers and media tie-in books. Read a couple of those, and then tell me which has better prose. I won't pretend that they are great works of literature; but they at least have a sense of lively playfulness with language.
I happen to like Junie B... if only by comparison to the dreck that is most early chapter books. The books are funny and they have a very real voice. I don't have the desire to read more than one all the way through--but somehow it often happens that I find myself near one, reading a chapter or two and wanting to know what comes next.
It's worth considering that the children of first-generation immigrants often grow up to speak perfect English without so much as an accent. If your mother and your father will not prevent you from acquiring all the normal grammar of English... will a fictional character with a 26-book empire really do that much harm? Really?
In fact, much of the humor in the books wouldn't work if the reader wasn't expected to notice Junie B.'s mistakes and find them funny. Yes, a five-year-old or six-year-old child may still be making some of these mistakes; but that's the distinction between competence and performance. You may know how to conjugate a Spanish verb; when you're in the midst of a conversation, however, your brain might not have the spare processor cycles to devote to that conjugation when you're just trying to make yourself understood. (There's a good bit of second-language-acquisition research on this; a speaker may be perfectly able to make a distinction on a test, or while writing an essay, but fail when it comes to speaking, because you don't have the time to edit yourself). One kind of pleasure in reading is pleasure at one's superiority: you know more than the character, you recognize that the character is being wrong or silly. The Junie B. books play on that pleasure in their plotlines, so doesn't it make sense that they would do the same thing with the prose?
The naysayers do have a point; it's harder to decode incorrectly spelled words than correctly spelled ones. But children are going to have to deal with this even if they don't read Junie B. Jones; they're going to be passing notes or IMs to each other, after all.
The children who aren't reading Junie B. are reading formulaic easy-readers and media tie-in books. Read a couple of those, and then tell me which has better prose. I won't pretend that they are great works of literature; but they at least have a sense of lively playfulness with language.