It is commonly assumed that skills involved in reading poetry, such as decoding and assessing the poem, scanning for details arise in social relations with others, which makes reading social. However, this is social in a weak sense because these new accomplishments result from people working together. Using an alternative theoretical framework…

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…

This article discusses how literacy and literature goals merged in a media project designed to encourage high school students to build new connections with the poetic elements of Shakespeare's plays "Romeo and Juliet" and "Julius Caesar." Using the free software Animoto movie maker, students were challenged to look closely at…

After briefly reviewing how reading is conceptualised in the "Progress in International Reading Literacy Study" and the English National Curriculum, this article examines two unofficial reading activities in a class of 10-11-year-olds' to see how far these activities match up with the official definitions of reading, or whether they…

Performing text in the form of choral reading, rap, reader's theatre, and/or simulations offers students a powerful vehicle for understanding and recalling key concepts and significant details culled from textual materials. Creating a script, poem, or lyrics to perform requires repeated readings of a text, a practice that increases participants'…

This paper examines the uniqueness of poetry and classroom methodology as found in children's experiences of hearing, enacting, discussing, and making poems. Poetry offers the peculiar use of language, form, and a fresh look. Poems are useful in the classroom as they are read differently from ordinary text, are read with both the eye and the ear,…

Compared construction of meaning in poetry for experts (PhD English candidates) and novices (undergraduates or high school students). Found that for experts, knowledge was an important component of poetic communication. Novices had well-developed expectations for understanding poetry as discourse. Experts used productive interpretive strategies to…

This article analyzes the function of deixis in the poetry of the 20th century Italian, Eugenio Montale, in particular, his "In limine." The main objective is to show how deixis is involved in the dynamic relationship between text and reader. A constant problem in Montale's texts is that of a disharmony felt by the poetic voice with the…

There appears to be a problem in the way students in introductory, nonmajor literature courses read poetry that affects the way they write about it. One widely accepted belief among students is that there is a hidden but identifiable meaning in the poem that they are supposed to discover. The problem with this strategy is that most students lack…

Many students think of poetry as a meaning to be figured out, a puzzle to be solved--as if poets were forever doomed to write only what they never quite mean and to mean what they never actually write. The struggle to discover meaning becomes acute with that distinctly modern poetry created by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and their…

This document is a compilation of the four issues in the 24th volume of "Classroom Notes Plus." issue of "Classroom Notes Plus" contains descriptions of original, unpublished teaching practices, and of adapted ideas. The August 2006 issue (v24 n1) includes: More Choice Leads to More Reading (Amy Ishee); Book-of-the Month Reports (Patricia Crist);…