Reductive policies for teaching and defining reading largely ignore the assemblage of multiple factors and forces that impact one's engagement with text. In this paper, we attend to the complex layers of reader response among emergent multilingual elementary students while engaging with multiple modalities and genres of social justice texts. We…

What can the affective turn mean for literacy educators who believe their work can lay the foundation for a life filled with meaningful reading pursuits, for students who "become" readers and "do" reading? Because reading occurs across and within an elaborate composite of time, space, relationships, histories, discourses, and…

Current standards push for elementary students to have text-based and text-centric discussions of what they read. This study explored what bilingual third-grade students talked about during small-group text-based discussions of informational texts. The author conducted a qualitative analysis of 10 video-recorded discussions, five of books matched…

This eight-month study, conducted in a first-grade classroom in the southwestern United States, analyzed young children's playful responses to literature. It focuses on framing a theory that underpins play as a form of reader response, which I term 'responsive play'. It further aims to answer the overarching research question and the sub-question:…

This multiple case study is part of a larger investigation of literacy practices in "Our Home," an after-school program that provides learning support to children from refugee backgrounds. I asked, "What happens when translingual children from refugee backgrounds respond to multicultural, transnational, and translingual…

Children as readers of picture books and the ways they respond to, and make meaning from, such texts are the focus of this article, which reports on a small-scale study undertaken in Norway and Wales, UK. The theoretical framing of the research draws on concepts of the multimodal ensemble in picture books and of the reading event as part of a…

The purpose of this paper is to discuss a pilot study conducted in a graduate action research class that sought to investigate the impact of multicultural literature experiences on third-grade students' ability to make empathetic connections in their writing and discussions about literature. Conducted as participant action research, five…

Reader response, simulation, and assimilation theories offer insights to our emotional connections with characters. Findings from a study conducted with avid fourth-grade readers show that when the children feel they are next to the character, they acentrally imagine the narrative and experience sympathy. The children also participate and…

Transaction circles weave together elements of guided reading and literature circles in an open conversational structure that supports students as agentive learners. Discourse within these circles utilizing digital informational texts assist in the development of democratic practices even in a time when federal mandates limit curricula and…

The basic features of digital reading devices (such as the Amazon Kindle) are described in this article. The author also considers how such devices can advance e-book readership among primary students by offering new avenues for accessing and interacting with a wide array of texts. Rooted in the transactional theory of reader response and a new…

This study documents to what extent writing on a blog in a networked learning environment could influence the affective variables of elementary-school students' writing. The framework is grounded more specifically in theory of self-determination (Deci & Ryan, 1985), relationship to writing (Chartrand & Prince, 2009) and the transactional…

Reader response theory and research on book interest underpinned a study of the appeal of celebrity-authored children's storybooks to elementary school students. We engaged fifth-grade students in selecting and reading from a set of 41 celebrity-authored books and completing reader response forms. Utilizing the survey research design and a…

Through their study of classroom talk about and around literary text, the authors discovered that their application of Rosenblatt's (1938/1995, 1978) "aesthetic" stance to elementary (primarily Grades 4-6) students' affective responses to literary text uniformly lacked the simultaneous articulation of "the real impact between the…

This study examined the motivation to read of children in grades two through six. All children in the study were strong in their literal comprehension of narrative text. Some were equally strong in their ability to respond thoughtfully to the text (Blue Group); others struggled to respond to questions requiring them to think about the implications…

Examines how researchers can study children's interaction with literature, discussing various perspectives that can be taken on children's literary responses and suggesting lines of inquiry and concepts that might be useful for the continued examination of children's responses. Focuses on the author, the literary text itself, the reader, and the…