Louise Rosenblatt's well-known concept of stance distinguishes between efferent reading (reading to take something away from the text) and aesthetic reading (reading for the experience of dwelling in the text). This article proposes a refinement to this binary, adding the concept of afferent reading. Afference, in biology, means a bringing-to, and…

This article responds to debates about what affects/effects reading in the primary school years, with a focus on tracing examples of matristic ontologies that foster success. We offer matristic ontologies, which are 'an entirely different concept of life, one based not on domination and hierarchies but on the relational web of life', as…

Using data collected during a qualitative study of a book group in an after-school programme at a public, urban elementary school, in this article, I analyse how immigrant- and refugee-background students discursively distanced themselves from the portrayal of refugees in the text "Outcasts United." The teacher chose this book because…

This article is based on the premise that mandated reading in literature classrooms may be perceived as an imposition and disliked by students. Attempts to address that scenario have suggested that text selection should be given more consideration to promote reading engagement, particularly by choosing texts which are familiar to the lifeworlds of…

In this paper, we demonstrate the relationship between reading and writing for pleasure. Children read a wide range of media as well as books for pleasure and develop strong affective bonds with the artefacts of literacy they encounter. What remains less well understood is the relationship between the array of texts children engage with and the…

The widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards in the US has prioritized rigorous reading of complex texts. The emphasis on text complexity has led to instructional and assessment materials that constrain critical literacy practices by emphasizing quantitative features of text, such as sentence length, and a static list of text…

The current study is a contribution to reading research dealing with tuition in reading comprehension and specifically with the issue of arranging tuition to support the development of metacognition. The empirical findings referred to in this study are from textual discussions of works of fiction in grades 6 and 7. The specific focus of the study…

This paper reports on some data on the effects of screen-based interactivity on children's engagement with storybook apps during family shared book reading that were gathered in a 2-year, small-scale ethnographic case study in Spain. Data analysis focuses on the complex interplay between the storybook app's interactive features and the children's…