This paper explores how three nineteenth-century women writers guided my thinking about education, oppression and spirituality during different decades of my twentieth-century life. In order to re-collect my epistemological journey, a process that requires analysis and reflection, the paper combines the critical lens of feminist theory with the…

This article outlines how a theory of narrative can be used to deconstruct qualitative research texts. Although research texts are a distinct genre in comparison with works of fiction, the basic components of literary activity are similar. Researchers structure and emphasize data and participants in various ways to tell a logical story. Narrative…

This article reports on two studies investigating reader stance, navigation, and response in expository hypertext. Subjects in the studies included 69 and 147 adult readers prompted to adopt either an efferent or aesthetic stance when reading a 36-node expository hypertext. Reading was followed by recall and essay writing tasks. Results of the…

This article is the conversion story of a university professor and voracious reader who has always been afraid to incorporate fiction into her classes. It maps her journey from believing that novels and short stories are effective pedagogical tools only when they are in the hands of competent English professors to recognizing the innumerable…

How do primary students construct understandings of the opposite sex? In what ways do these constructions manifest in the visual texts created in literacy and language arts classrooms? Using visual discourse analysis (Albers, 2007) and scheme analysis (Sonesson, 1988) as interpretive methods, we analyzed the visual texts created by 23 third grade…

Do individuals know what words Shakespeare actually wrote? Exploring these issues can yield dramatic interest. With references to Shakespeare's Quartos and Folios, the author examines key textual issues and discrepancies in classroom studies of "Hamlet." (Contains 8 notes.)

The present experiment tested the hypothesis that discrepancies in processing fluency influence the perceived wrongness of moral violations. Participants were presented with numerous moral violations in easy or difficult to read fonts. For some violations, experienced perceptual fluency was consistent with the fluency associated with previous…

A widespread theoretical assumption is that many processes involved in text comprehension are automatic, with automaticity typically defined in terms of properties (e.g., speed, effort). In contrast, the authors advocate for conceptualization of automaticity in terms of underlying cognitive mechanisms and evaluate one prominent account, the…

This article reports on a teacher's experiment with Reader's Theatre (RT), an interactive play reading activity with elements of reading aloud, drama and theatre, for her 20 unmotivated learners of literature in a premier school in Malaysia. Using RT, the students staged Angela Wright's "Potato People". The procedures and design of the…

The ability to read is well-recognized as essential to being successful in school history. To be able to read history textbooks effectively, students can be made aware of some features typical of history discourse. Knowledge of how nominal groups are functional in history discourse can help students and teachers engage with the meanings presented…

This article describes the writing of one third-grade English-language learner (ELL) to illustrate how generous reading can provide a bridge for ELLs when their writing is not yet ready for a more judgmental reading. It presents a formalized approach that builds upon students' linguistic strengths and traces their written words to sources in the…

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a whole picture book worth? This was exactly the question Pierce School teachers asked themselves when they began the project of compiling a photo library for creating realistic and relevant short texts by and for students across all grades in their K-8 elementary school. In an effort to…

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…

When Taylor Carroll was in seventh and eighth grade at the Henniker School in Henniker, New Hampshire, her music teacher, Anne Hueglin, made music class fun. Now Carroll is a music teacher herself, covering K-8 general music, band, and chorus at the Nottingham School in Nottingham, New Hampshire. Following the lead of Hueglin, she teaches her own…

Children ages 2-18 spend between two and four hours per day watching TV, a calculation that is even higher if DVDs, videos and the Internet are included. Although the amount of television watched by today's children has raised concerns about their literacy development, captions could hold a key to turning television into an educational asset.…