Reading engagement is an essential component of children's reading achievement. This three-chapter dissertation considers a new approach to conceptualizing reading engagement through the lens of children's immersion, or absorption, in a text. Chapter 1 examines the theoretical underpinnings of story world absorption, sometimes known as…

What affects moment-to-moment motivation to read? Existing reading motivation questionnaires are trait-based and not well suited to capturing the dynamic, situational influences of text or social context. Drawing on the decision science literature, we have created a paradigm to measure situational enjoyment during reading. Using this paradigm, we…

When two people read the same story, they might both end up liking it very much. However, this does not necessarily mean that their reasons for liking it were identical. We therefore ask what factors contribute to "liking" a story, and--most importantly--how people vary in this respect. We found that readers like stories because they…

The practice of memorising poems has commonly been perceived as outdated in recent years. By the 1980s, indeed, learning poems by heart frequently headed up a list of old-fashioned pedagogies deemed responsible for turning young people off poetry. Yet it would be hard to overestimate how enormous a gap this opened up with the core assumptions that…

Sensory reading refers to reading that engages all six of the human senses - vison, hearing, touch, gustation, olfaction and proprioception. The author proposes that increased attention be paid to the three 'hidden' senses of gustation, olfaction and proprioception to advance innovative reading studies. She articulates the problematic of visually…

This article explores the potential for engaging 7 and 8-year-old school pupils in performative literature interpretation through process drama. Inspired by new materialism and affect theory, we focus on how literature interpretations come into being in dramatic fiction, and on how these becoming interpretations merge with the classroom. The study…

This paper uses a Gwen Harwood poem to open up questions of "knowing" around the teaching of Literature. Following our own brief reading of the poem, we particularly discuss ways in which questions of knowing/knowledge have been considered in Literature teaching historically, such as: - the binary of "knowledge" and…

This autobiographical essay explores the significance that Marxist literary theory has had for me as an English educator. Marxist literary theorists have produced increasingly refined understandings of the formal complexities of literary works, but the reach of such criticism has been limited because they have failed to conceive it as part of a…

In this age of PDFs and free e-texts, literature gets separated from its initial context, perhaps even devoid of context all together. Taking Roald Dahl's most anthologized short story "Lamb to the Slaughter" as its object of study, this article proposes a pedagogy that embraces the return of paratextual material to the literature…

Promising approaches to transforming English language arts classrooms into dialogic, democratic, and critical spaces for literature discussions involve the selection of compelling young adult literature (YAL) and the use of student-centered discussion strategies (e.g., literature circles). Scholars have demonstrated, however, the shortcomings of…