In 2014, a US college created a policy requiring faculty to provide trigger warnings for students. This spurred a heated debate across North America regarding the need for and efficacy of trigger warnings in classes. A content analysis of comment responses (over 1500) to 20 articles on the topic of trigger warnings from two higher education news…

A key instructional goal of English language arts instruction is teaching students to read and interpret complex literary texts. This report reviews the literature on the development and pedagogy of literary analysis skills. It analyzes literary analysis skills as a "key practice," a bundle of disciplinary skills and strategies that form…

The aim of this study is to review research on poetry reading pedagogy in secondary education from 1990 to 2015. Today there is little research on poetry teaching in Sweden and thus little guidance for secondary teachers. Therefore, this study thematically analyses peer-reviewed articles from English language international journals. Articles were…

Cooney, Shealy, and Arvold (1998) wrote a widely-cited paper that described four belief structures of prospective teachers and argued the structures can aid in describing the ways beliefs change and the influence of authority on the individual. In this paper, we investigate the impact of this manuscript on the field. We first conducted a…

Creating meaning from a literary text is a complex process involving interaction between the reader and the text. Theoretical and empirical investigations of how and why readers respond to literature are reviewed, and methodological problems involved in analyzing readers' oral responses are addressed. (PP)

This article presents a case study class response to Mildred Taylor's now classic and widely read novel, "Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry." Through data collected during one school year, the ways urban, adolescent students use their contemporary lenses to interpret the literary theme of "confronting, overcoming and challenging racism" are discussed.…

Jurgen Habermas's theory of communicative action has held much promise for critical theory and its examination of the structure of society. This theory, however, has been accused by some as being limited in regard to other forms of discourse, especially fictional, mythical, and religious texts. Habermas has argued that literature (i.e., fictive…

Reviews Jessie Bernard's writings on women, work, and family. Explores the dilemmas of caring, the feminization of work, work and family roles over the life course, and the two worlds of women and men. Suggests implications for future research on women's work and family roles. (BH)

This column shares innovative lesson ideas grounded in current literature or action research. Two books are discussed: Lesley Atwater Kahle's book "Cut Word Story," which allows students to become individually engrossed in words and grammar within stories that they create; and Anete Vasquez's "Literary Analysis 101", which gives teachers a simple,…

Because canon formation directly influences curriculum construction, classical Greek rhetorical studies must make an assessment of how women's presence in these historical discourses has been at best marginalized, at worst erased. The structural oppression of women as a class and the institution of slavery need to be included in school curricula…

Klin et al., 2004 and Levine et al., 2000 concluded that readers fail to resolve noun phrase anaphors when the antecedent is difficult to retrieve from memory and the inference is not necessary for comprehension. In four experiments we investigated the hypothesis that these inferences were actually partially encoded. Although the results of a…

Examines Louise Rosenblatt's theory of the reading transaction to aid teachers in the dilemma of either encouraging individual responses to literature or expecting literal comprehension of the material. Encourages teachers to look at their teaching purposes for any given text and to match questions and activities to those purposes. (SR)

Summarizes the history of, and theory and research in, reader response approaches to teaching literature. Proposes an instructional process employing response-based teaching. (MM)

Discusses the opposing viewpoints of the two most influential linguists of this century--Saussure and Chomsky--suggesting that while both are interested in form as opposed to substance, Saussure sees linguistics as a branch of semiotics and Chomsky sees it as part of cognitive psychology. Evaluates the relevance of these two viewpoints to the…

Reviews recent articles focusing on the controversy surrounding the appropriateness of readability formulas for technical writing. Suggests that further research should be conducted to study empirically how readability as a concept might be used to aid the technical writer since readability formulas are shaping computerized editing programs. (KEH)