Analyzing user behavior in electronic textbooks offers appealing insights into how pupils interact with the book and internalize the content. Using these insights may help to personalize the book, e.g., to support users with special educational needs. Conventional approaches often focus on atomic, user-triggered events like clicks or scrolls. In…

Guided and grounded by Eisner's 1982 "Model of Transactions Between the Individual and the Environment," this paper explores how students negotiate perceptions of meaning that are both internalized through the art of reading a text and experienced through individualized transactions of representational and conceptual comprehension.…

To address inequitable literacy attainment and achieve equitable opportunity in literacy education, every teacher must be knowledgeable about reading practices and processes. This study examines the knowledge about reader-text interactions articulated by 21 middle school teachers, and explores the ways teachers convert that knowledge into…

This article will focus on sociolinguistic aspects in Terry Pratchett's "The Wee Free Men." In particular we will deal with the interplay of standard and non-standard British English by which the writer highlights cultural stereotypes as well as narrative ones; creating a children's tale with a distinctively adult-like character set.…

The present study investigates the use of authentic texts (fiction and non-fiction) in 180 video-recorded language arts lessons across 46 secondary classrooms in Norway. It assesses how the texts are used and what kind of language arts-related activities and discourses students are engaging in. The study finds that a majority of the lessons do not…

The purpose of this paper is to discuss a pilot study conducted in a graduate action research class that sought to investigate the impact of multicultural literature experiences on third-grade students' ability to make empathetic connections in their writing and discussions about literature. Conducted as participant action research, five…

Engagement during reading can be measured by the amount of time readers invest in the reading process. It is hypothesized that disengagement is marked by a decrease in time investment as compared with the demands made on the reader by the text. In this study, self-paced reading times for screens of text were predicted by a text complexity score…

Adopting a qualitative design, the present study aimed to highlight Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism in relation to the objectives of teacher education in KSA. To bring this theory to teacher education, the study considered the ways in which students, texts and the instructor interact--enter into dialogue--in order to generate meaning and…

This is a conceptual paper, based on several semesters of collaboration in which the American author interacted with students in the Taiwanese author's EFL classes in Taiwan. The best native language users are typically those who read extensively, especially reading for pleasure in their youth. This gives them a large vocabulary and an intuitive…

Everyone loves a mystery story, probably for two reasons: The first is that the mystery story is the only literary genre that is written for the reader to follow and match their intellectual acumen with the protagonist. By doing so, the genre invites the reader into its own world as an active participant, not merely an innocent bystander (Pollock,…

If murder mysteries are to carry an epistemic force, it is important to examine how murder mysteries represent a unique way of knowing, of coming to view the world, for their readers. This can be accomplished by looking at the text of murder mysteries and how the nature of the text influences the reality creating process; by exploring the nature…

Two scientific ideas have been discerned in 20th century thinking: the structuralism common in Europe and the functionalism apparent in the United States. This paper presents two experiments in text analysis. One discusses the behaviorist writing style of Ernest Hemingway. It hypothesizes that since he is a behaviorist in practice, he should be a…

This paper considers one researcher's challenge of marking his progress in reading/studying Jacques Derrida's "Aporias" (1993) by what he calls the continual hermeneutic of making meaning. The paper places the "Aporias" reading in the setting of a weekly research group whose research cycle was creating meaning in and out of the…

This paper presents a model delineating attributes which enable a literate reader to successfully participate in a pluralistic society. The paper outlines the model as building upon and defining the traditional skills and schema views of reading comprehension which include maturity, attitudes, dispositions, intellectual abilities, knowledge, and…

In defining an audience, writers make guesses about the mutual knowledge shared between writer and readers, and thus send cues to readers that exclude them from the audience for a specific discourse. Often writers assume that readers possess more knowledge than they actually do, and so make it impossible for readers to function within the world of…