This article considers children's engagement with the "Ologies", a series of postmodern texts that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction. It follows on from a text-based analysis of the series published in this journal (22(3) 2015). Data collected from 9-12 year olds demonstrate how actual readers took up the invitation offered by…

Literary gaps were identified by Wolfgang Iser in 1974 as "vacant pages" that invite the reader to reflect and enter into the text thereby motivating students to experience the text as reality. Arthur Applebee, in 1979, identified three categories to distinguish children's types of interaction with stories: (1) the complexity of literary…

Reading comprehension is much more than a decoding of the printed words on the page; it is, rather, a complex interaction between readers and their personal past experiences as they relate to the text. A connection between the text and past experiences of the readers can stimulate expectations about the text. Facilitating these links presupposes a…

The purpose of this research study was to explore the effects of children's trade books on the development of science concepts. The two objectives of this exploratory study were to determine whether children's ideas about specific science concepts change when trade books containing information about those concepts are read to them, and…