This article draws on Philip Barnard's model of the interactions between theory and practice, between basic and applied research, to investigate the paradox of reading as an experience both private and public. It uses internal reader experience as a starting point for exploration, evoking the concept of a readerly sense of presence as a selection…

Discusses potential dangers in the current move toward literature-based instruction across the curriculum. Calls for educators to help students understand that there are different stances one can take in reading a text and not to mislead them by treating literary works as if they were intended to be read "efferently." (MG)

Examines intertextual relationships in "The Wedding Ghost," a children's book written by Leon Garfield and illustrated by Charles Keeping. Concludes that, as a top-down component in reading, intertextuality has significant implications for how texts are approached and can be seen as an element which promotes the development of high-level…

Provides a theoretical framework for thinking about how students read literature through the notions of envisionment-building and stories. Discusses possibilities for instruction. (MG)

Discusses children's pictures termed "visual manifold narratives" (picture books that develop more than one narrative line by including two or more sets of separate pictures on the page). Discusses some uses of the manifold narrative, the reader's role in constructing meaning, subversion of the linear narrative, the metafictionality of manifold…

Argues that the way teachers and students transact with a piece of literature needs to change if teachers are to change the way students read and see themselves as readers. Suggests teachers need to support a variety of responses and avoid the tendency to reduce discussion to a search for a single main idea. Includes a brief response by Susan…

Illustrates how social interaction with high quality literature can foster the literacy process of responding to literature with the student's own voice. Demonstrates ways that particular instructional processes can foster critical literacy processes as students share their interpretations of quality literature. (MG)

Suggests that the real power of the childhood reading encounter is less in the specific elements of story or character and more in what is accomplished by the private interchange between child and book. Discusses the differences between reading and being read to and between reading and television watching. (AEF)

Sixteen experienced teachers of reading, from a large, northeastern, American university, were asked how, in their elementary classrooms, they would approach the story of Cinderella. This was done in an attempt to find out what conception teachers might have about the way texts could themselves teach children to negotiate meaning, how teachers saw…

Noting that books for children must be just as entertaining, if not more so, than television or film in order to maintain young readers' attention, this paper discusses combining entertainment with didacticism in children's and adolescent literature. The first part of the paper offers a writer's reflections on the experience of writing science…

Explores the effects of the use of aesthetic and efferent stances in response to literature with 43 fourth graders, 47 sixth graders, and 40 eighth graders. Finds use of an aesthetic stance is associated with higher levels of personal understanding and the level of understanding increases with grade level. (MG)

Explores the nature of the picture story book event from a semiotic perspective. Describes a classroom event in which a picture story book was constructed during teacher-student-text interaction in a second grade classroom using involving oral reading and discussion, interpretations of the main character's traits, letters to the author, and…

Argues against ritualized approaches to literature. Endorses four aesthetic teaching stances which vary the conversations that can occur between student and student, student and teacher, and student and literature, and which pursue a "playful" literature curriculum, value the unexpected, and allow conversations where children talk their…

In the 1970s and 1980s the white Australian author Patricia Wrightson's cross-cultural fantasies concerning the conflict of White characters with Aboriginal folk spirits struck a chord with many adolescent and adult readers who judged these novels to be outstandingly successful. A classroom-based study examined the responses of a class of seventh…

Focusing on the importance of the search for meaning in reading, the essays in this book address critical reading and the confusion about the place of skill development in the search for meaning. The following works are included: "Introduction to the 50th Yearbook" (M. P. Douglass); "The Quest for Meaning" (M. Poplin);…