This article describes a study of both textual and reader response analyses of "The Skin I'm In" by Sharon Flake. Because gender and race constitute central themes in the narrative, Black feminist thought and feminism undergirded the textual critique. Critics' reviews, scholarly articles, and published author interviews also supported the textual…

"Following the Curve of the Sentence: Notes From a Reader's Diary" is comprised of excerpts from the author's Reader's Diary, using experimental writing practices that can be modeled and used by English teachers in classrooms. The Reader's Diary is a subgenre of autobiography, memoir and poetic prose essay, a flexible, hybrid form of inquiry. The…

Designed to help middle and secondary level teachers create spaces for students to explore multiple perspectives and interpretations of their texts, this brochure offers teachers who have experienced classroom talk that leads to gender divisiveness among students an opportunity to consider new ways of thinking about such talk. The brochure…

It's not that boys can not read, they just do not read. Study after study reveals that boys read less than girls. And according to the U.S. Department of Education, school-age boys tend to read a grade and a half lower than girls. How can librarians get guys to turn the page? For starters, they need to move beyond their traditional "here is a book…

Book leveling, a way to organize texts to match them with readers, has been widely implemented in primary classrooms. This article questions whether the often excessive attention to leveling leads to the neglect of other factors that influence the reader-text match. The authors present findings from a small study that aimed to determine the…

Theory has always possessed an elusive, intangible, and almost ethereal quality. Comprising nothing but ideas compressed into words, it is supposed to guide literacy interactions and transactions. Theory provides the "why" that underlies the "how to" of teaching. Yet the author, a teacher, has often struggled with the effort of translating theory…