Exploring Children´s Responses to Peter Sís´s Madlenka in Multicultural Contexts. Metaphor to the Construction of Cultural Referents

The focus of this study is to understand the extent to which reading Madlenka (2000), by Peter Sís, contributes to the construction of referents concerning culture and reader identity in the multicultural setting of two primary school classrooms. We present the results of an analysis of student responses to a shared reading task and literary conversation. The conclusions indicate that the readers assigned meaning to the book through shared knowledge, thus leading them to identify the metaphorical key that granted them access to their own oral and written metaphors and thereby construct cultural and identity-related points of reference.