Reading is an integral part of scholarly practice, though we do not often discuss how our approaches to reading differ, and how these approaches may ultimately make interpretive impact on our research. This essay considers approaches to reading in light of the concepts of proximity and orientation. Though formal "close reading" is a…

A key instructional goal of English language arts instruction is teaching students to read and interpret complex literary texts. This report reviews the literature on the development and pedagogy of literary analysis skills. It analyzes literary analysis skills as a "key practice," a bundle of disciplinary skills and strategies that form…

An important purpose of reading literature is to move beyond the literal text to construct an interpretation of what the text conveys about the human condition and nature of the world. In two experiments, college students with no prior training in literary analysis read a short story and responded to one of four task instructions (plot, ambiguous,…

One of the major problems from which students suffer has to do with reading: reading with diligence, understanding, and, ideally, with the pleasure that attends discovery. Many students have long been hermeneutical-readers-of-a-sort. The problem has deep roots in a widely diffused media and technocyber environment that thins down and disperses the…

Over the past decade in the United States, levelled texts, or "little books" with finely graduated levelling of text difficulty, have regained their status as a literacy staple for beginning readers. Despite their resurgence, questions remain regarding the reliability and quality of these books. In this study, we conducted a detailed…

This paper reflects upon Plato's "Phaedrus" from a background in education and experience teaching written business communications. The interpretation and development presented are guided by the Platonic method of collection and division, which is introduced in "Phaedrus." The paper begins with an evaluative overview, followed…

The use of cinema in a French literature class can help students become more aware of their role as receivers in the reading process. "Le retour de Martin Guerre" and "Entre Nous" helped develop students' awareness of gender's importance in a variety of literary texts. (16 references) (LB)

Compared construction of meaning in poetry for experts (PhD English candidates) and novices (undergraduates or high school students). Found that for experts, knowledge was an important component of poetic communication. Novices had well-developed expectations for understanding poetry as discourse. Experts used productive interpretive strategies to…

This article analyzes the function of deixis in the poetry of the 20th century Italian, Eugenio Montale, in particular, his "In limine." The main objective is to show how deixis is involved in the dynamic relationship between text and reader. A constant problem in Montale's texts is that of a disharmony felt by the poetic voice with the…

Presents results of a study of how readers fill in information "gaps" in a text to make meaning, using adolescents' response to a story by Brecht. Concludes that such gaps bore children uninterested in making meaning, and that those who make meaning from a mechanical stance may be limited in their comprehension unless deeper ways of…

Reviews several books that seek to explain what some of the structures of meaning are that stories present to readers and feed into their memories. (HOD)

Explores responses to fiction reading by students who record these responses in journals. (NKA)

A study investigated the effects of writing in a personal and a formal mode on students' understanding of literary text. Formal text-based and personal reader-based writing samples produced by 65 tenth grade students in response to two stories from D. Sohn's "Ten Modern American Short Stories" were analyzed for quality of response,…

There appears to be a problem in the way students in introductory, nonmajor literature courses read poetry that affects the way they write about it. One widely accepted belief among students is that there is a hidden but identifiable meaning in the poem that they are supposed to discover. The problem with this strategy is that most students lack…

Explores briefly the New Criticism that dominated literature instruction until recently and then provides an overview of reader response theory and how response approaches can be used in the classroom to enhance reading. (NKA)