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…

With increased availability of information in modern societies, individuals are often faced with complex decisions regarding how to integrate and judge the veracity of available information. Generally, these issues have been approached using computational techniques to "detect" and "reduce" the spread of information across…

Research suggests that writing the dissertation is one of the major barriers to doctoral students completing their degrees (Di Pierro, 2007). Much of the research on dissertation writing focuses on teaching the technical aspects of dissertation writing and fails to address the underlying issues that give rise to students' struggles with…

The term "close reading" often conjures up an image of a teacher asking students several scripted questions that encourage them to reread and critically examine a text. The teacher then evaluates the students' responses. In this article, the authors offer another approach to close reading--one that places students' text-dependent…

Purpose: Scholars who advocate for equity-oriented educational practices have argued that the accountability era in the USA, now in place for two decades, has failed in its intended goal to improve student performance for traditionally marginalized student populations. This study aims to use a sociocultural lens to trace how a century-old…

AP Literature students participated in a series of real-time online discussions to complement the in-class conversations they were having about "The Autobiography of Malcolm X." Thus, the front channel was comprised of the students who were discussing the class text aloud, and the backchannel was the online conversation the rest of the…

One reaction to the Common Core State Standards is a new emphasis on "close reading," an approach to teaching comprehension that requires students to extract meaning from text by examining how language is used in a passage. The intent is to strengthen their ability to learn from complex text independently and thus enhance college and…

A fresh look at the reader response theory to enhance student comprehension through meaningful interactions with literature, this paper explores the instructional implications of a reader response approach in secondary classrooms and examines its role in fostering students' critical reading and thinking skills. The approach promotes transaction…

Students engage in higher-order thinking as they read complex texts and perform complex reading-related tasks. However, the most consequential assessments, high-stakes tests, are currently limited in providing information about students' higher-order thinking. In this article, we describe higher-order thinking in relation to reading. We provide a…

This article addresses 3 broad challenges of assessment in reading comprehension: (a) explicitly articulating the knowledge and skills students need to recognize and be able to use in comprehending complex texts; (b) understanding how knowledge and skills progress and successively deepen and develop over repeated opportunities to engage in tasks…

This paper uses the example of an extra-curricular Graphic Novel Reading Group in order to explore the institutional critical reading practices that take place in English classrooms in the senior years of secondary school. Drawing on Stanley Fish's theory of interpretive communities, it questions the restrictive interpretive strategies applied to…

This article explores an opportunity for the cultivation of moral dispositions through the hermeneutical activity performed by learners engaged in the study of texts. It seeks to direct teachers' attention to potential moral dimensions of the hermeneutical activity itself, an activity that might otherwise be perceived merely as a means to…

Recently, transactional reader response theory has been criticized for providing an inadequate theoretical guide for the study of multicultural literature. Some scholars argue that Rosenblatt assumes the reader and her response to literature are ideologically innocent and the continuum of aesthetic and efferent stance does not encompass critical…

This study examined the influence of critical reading orientation on use of external strategies such as note-taking and underlining while reading an expository text. In two experiments, undergraduate students were asked either to review an article on a linguistic policy (critical reading) or to summarise it (less-critical reading). Experiment 1…

The study compared effects of two ways of making text more explicit for learning disabled (LD) children: by adding supportive information or asking inference questions at the ends of episodes. Adding elaborative content enhanced story understanding while asking inference questions was not more effective than the explicit version of the text alone.…