Children's literature helps young people make sense of gender. However, while books offer children the imaginative ability to create their own worlds, normative gender can manifest in characters and stories. The study described in this article draws upon "disruptive" storytimes with 114 preschool children, interviews with 20 parents and…

If we want to move children from struggling to read to being proficient readers, we must address the disparate ways that teachers respond to readers with varying abilities. Restorative practices, akin to restorative justice, build relationships, make connections, and foster a reader's sense of ownership and empowerment. What would happen if…

Researchers in distance education are interested in observing and modelling of learner's personality profile, and adapting their learning experiences accordingly. When learners read and interact with their reading materials, they do unselfconscious activities like annotation which may be a key feature of their personalities. Annotation activity…

Framed as the "transaction" between readers and texts, this article examines the scripture reading practices of three Methodist youth. Data were generated through verbal protocols in which youth verbalized their thinking as they read self-selected passages from the Bible. Multiple rounds of inductive thematic analyses identified how the…

To address inequitable literacy attainment and achieve equitable opportunity in literacy education, every teacher must be knowledgeable about reading practices and processes. This study examines the knowledge about reader-text interactions articulated by 21 middle school teachers, and explores the ways teachers convert that knowledge into…

An increasing amount of attention has been paid to the ways in which classroom discussions shift in response to varying contextual conditions (Allen & Moller, 2009; Morrow & Smith, 1990) and group composition (Allen & Moller, 2009; Evans, 1997). Recently, researchers have suggested that the classroom might be a place to explore and…

In literature, composition, and other areas of English Studies, relateability can be an important tool to inscribe marginalized subjects as academic citizens. However, its larger arc reproduces ethnocentric and individualistic ideologies at the national and personal levels that foreclose the true understanding of and engagement with Otherness that…

Learning occurs when students engage in discursive processes that include actively considering the comments and perspectives of others, allowing for interpretation and explanation of the topics being discussed (Gillies). Teachers should "resist the urge to turn close reading into an independent activity. The point of close reading is to…

This article explores how choral reading can be used as a drama tool in a classroom setting to engage students with nonfiction rhetoric while adhering to the Common Core State Standards.

Literature classrooms hold great potential to educate students for critical global citizenship through serious engagement with marginalized stories that test or subvert mainstream knowledges and structures, including the familiar humanitarian framework that dominates Western thinking about the Global South. Unfortunately, much existing literary…

This study proposes a method for implementing trained peer response within the multiliteracies framework and then qualitatively examines its effectiveness. Three factors are considered: (1) the extent to which peer response training engaged learners in all four knowledge processes; (2) the quality of peer-to-peer feedback; and (3) students'…

Tom Lichtenheld shares a new story of the power of music by illustrating Joe Raposo's classic "Sesame Street" song "Sing." In addition to lesson suggestions for general music classes, a discussion of and application to the theory of transactional reading are included.

This study reports the outcomes of research investigating the relationship between two variables; percentage of word knowledge in an academic English text and reading comprehension scores the participants got for the same text. The study was conducted at Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Preparatory Year Deanship, during the first semester…

Michael Swan and Catherine Walter (see EJ1142765) take issue with the current emphasis in the teaching of listening and reading on higher-order skills-and-strategies training. They argue that L2 learners typically already possess the relevant skills and strategies necessary for listening and reading in L2, and, by implication, can and do deploy…

This study raises the question what makes school texts comprehensible by analyzing whether students' genre expectations about literary or expository texts moderate the impact of different forms of text cohesion on reading comprehension, even when the texts are similar regarding their genre. 754 students (Grade 9) from comprehensive schools read…