Describes a teacher educator's return to high school English teaching, reflecting on her disappointment and dissatisfaction with her teaching of "Macbeth" and examining five uses of theory for better understanding the school, the students, the text, the essays, and the act of reading. The paper highlights the importance of race, social…

Using a critical model of reader response to literature in diverse urban secondary classrooms is important. The model helps teachers encourage diverse readers to generate their own text so they can engage with text that is more interesting than the traditional canon and become more willing and able to respond. Samples of diverse urban students'…

By having students use their knowledge of real-world cultural contexts to construct text-world contexts, teachers help them understand how cultural forces within those contexts shape characters' actions. This paper describes the process of linking real- and text-world contexts, offering examples from one college class. Implications for helping…

The relationship of syntactic sensitivities to fluency and understanding are usually neglected when discussing reading fluency. The article describes oral reading and interpretation activities in one seventh grade class undertaken to improve comprehension and fluency. It also discusses evaluation methods, such as portfolios and recordings as…