When the authors taught Walter Dean Myers's postmodern young adult novel "Monster" to ninth graders, they assumed the students would like the text, as its format and style resemble that of popular television crime shows. The authors also assumed the students would be savvy readers of the text, capable of understanding and integrating postmodern…

Americans are reading less; comprehension is eroding. And where reading intersects with academic achievement and participation in civic matters and cultural activities, the results are dire. Thus concludes the new National Endowment for the Arts study, "To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence". A divergent group of experts…

Cambourne and Turbill trace the growth, change and finally marginalisation of progressive approaches to literacy education by examining whole language philosophy in Australia from the 1960s to the present. Using a critical lens, Cambourne and Turbill describe how whole language has been positioned throughout the last nearly 50 years in terms of…