As an approach to literary study, critical literacy is not a widespread practice in New Zealand secondary schools. This article draws on a major project on teaching literature in the multicultural classroom that take place over two years in 2008-2009. In it we report on a case study where a Year 13 English teacher designed and tested a novel…

This article examines the reading of leveled books and the assessment of students' reading levels in a public school classroom. The purpose of the research study was to examine how these processes of assessment, which often go unnoticed, shaped the ways reading and readers were defined. The research was located in a third grade, public school…

This article describes some of the foundational social contracts about written texts that two-year-olds and their teachers were negotiating in a U.S. preschool writing center. Social contracts are shared cultural knowledge that individuals draw on to produce and use written texts in culturally appropriate ways. Participants in this study were 18…

Examines the ways in which the interpretation of a literary text is constructed through social interaction in a multi-ethnic urban secondary school English classroom. Suggests that despite the exhaustive regulation of literacy and school English, some English teachers, while still curriculum and examination focused, have connections between texts…

Describes one second-grade student's interaction with the picture books of Gerald McDermott. Describes the classroom context, and discusses McDermott's work. Describes the child's thoughtful and creative responses to McDermott's picture books in a classroom that supported students' explorations. Notes the importance of engaging children in…

Extracts from four case studies of student readers describe how students approached the reading of the same text, the students' general approach to academic reading, and their feelings about reading and being a student. Suggests that the normally neutral or pleasurable private activity of reading is disturbed in the academic context by the threat…

Follows the development, from fifth grade through eighth grade, of a student poet, who can teach educators what it means to "feel expressed." Offers new ways to think about who children are, what they need to say, and what they need to be taught. Discusses the possibilities of poetry for gaining access to children's deepest capacities for…

Examines in-depth one kindergarten child's comprehension when reading "considerate" (including multimedia effects integral to the story) and "inconsiderate" (including incidental multimedia effects) CD-ROM talking books in a classroom computer center. Finds considerate CD-ROM talking books support the child's understanding and retelling of the…

Recounts specific examples in the life of a three-year-old which illustrate how he began making connections between print and meaning and using what he learned from literature to expand his knowledge of the world. Notes literature is not only a powerful influence but also a very natural one. (NH)

Explores what students are learning by writing literature responses. Accentuates the influential role of teachers in literature. Discusses the need for educators to engage in ongoing reflection about their theoretical beliefs and pedagogical practices regarding literature- and response-based programs. (RS)

Discusses how three girls take up competing social messages about gendered identity in the different kinds of texts they read. Explains that it is in the complex transactions between the reader's prior lived experiences and the language of the text where meaning is shaped. Contends that when girls are encouraged to consider the actions of female…

When one educator was teaching English in middle and high school, she wondered why so many adolescents disliked reading. Even teen-aged protagonists and up-to-the-minute topics were not guaranteed to be "interesting." Yet something engages these young readers, at times and in some texts. To begin to get some answers, she interviewed…

Centers on the power of words (words from literature) that have woven themselves into the lives of the author's two daughters. Examines the children's response to literature as they became writers of prose and poetry in elementary school, showing how, when, where, and why the children use literary language to enhance and express their own verbal…

The psychological report is a particular genre of writing, incorporating elements of content and style shared by other literary genres, and appearing in many different forms. These forms range from terse, profile driven description of strengths and weaknesses, characteristic of computer generated psychological reports, to more descriptive,…

Concerned with redefining instructional theory related to the teaching and learning processes in literature, this paper concentrates on articulating principles underlying literature instruction that can be taught in methods courses and that can become the framework that teachers internalize and use to make daily decisions about their teaching and…