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)

Some educators (Ravitch, 1990) have suggested that students use multiple source documents to study history. Such documents could be primary sources, such as Congressional bills or eyewitness accounts, or secondary sources, such as later commentaries. This study examined the processes used when 19 tenth-grade high school students were presented…

What is pleasing about hypertext is what has always been pleasing about genre fiction: the creative process of reading. Genre novels are written to a formula--and often called formula fiction. Critics say they are written to make money and to make money only. According to C. S. Lewis, they "rot the mind." If looked at from the standpoint…

This paper focuses on methods to improve the reading abilities of college students. A list of five elements college instructors (who are not reading specialists) should establish in a content reading agenda is offered; (1) an instructional basis for the reading process which will work for them; (2) content literacy environments; (3) insights into…

Any model of reading must take into account the role of the language system in reading. Readers' subjectivities and the reading position taken up in a text can be explicated by demonstrating how texts function in context and how readers function in social situations to construct possible meanings. Components of this model include text and context…

A qualitative study examined the ways in which middle school and high school students create meanings when they are reading literary and non-literary texts. Subjects, 18 seventh-grade and 18 eleventh-grade students attending schools in an inner city or a suburban school district and judged by their teachers to be either above, at, or below average…

Elements from literary, composition, and reader-response theory can be successfully combined in teaching an African-American literature class to college students of the dominant culture. Helping students to decode texts is of primary importance, best done by introducing students to the cultural codes used by minority writers to shape their themes.…

A study reanalyzed data from two previous studies to investigate (1) validity of imagery ratings and reports as measures of reader response to a story, and (2) similarity of final regression models for recall and imagery reports. Imagery and affect ratings of story paragraphs were found to predict both imagery reports and recall of a second,…

A study was conducted to write an ethnographic description of how the influences of the reader's culture and the culture depicted in a text are associated with the responses of first-semester college freshmen to a series of contemporary Appalachian short stories. Cultural backgrounds of six informants and the cultures depicted in six stories were…

A study investigated how two text-based factors, word relationships and surface syntactic structure, interact with readers' ability to analyze the semantic relationships and make inferences based on those analyses. In each passage, the influence of word relationships was assessed by manipulating the degree of semantic entailment between two words…

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…

This book, intended for researchers in the psychology of reading and language, college students in psychology and education, teachers of reading, and educators in general, is designed to be used in a course on the psychology of reading or the psychology of language comprehension. The book contains the following chapters: (1) "An Introduction and…

A study assessed the reliability and some aspects related to the validity of an open sentence approach to assessing comprehension during silent reading. Subjects, 37 randomly selected seventh-grade students, read an "Opin" passage, prepared by deleting the second half of every other sentence. The blanks filled in by students were…

A study examined whether illustrations that must be attended to in order to make sense of a text hinder decoding by encouraging dependence on such illustrations for interpretation of text, both for decoding and for answering questions. Subjects--167 first graders--were asked to read four stories, two of which were taken from basal readers and two…