Poetry has been around for nearly five millennia, yet never has it been more puzzling. Technology, social media, and the blinding pace of contemporary life leave many students and readers in the dark. Just in time, this book comes to the rescue not just with a response to the problem of understanding and enjoying poetry, but it offers a solution.…

This article posits that the comic medium, wedded with traditional essay assignments, may be a powerful tool for social studies teachers, those who prepare social studies teachers at the collegiate level and other teachers and professors who desire to teach about citizenship in an era of "fake news" and alternative facts.

This article aims to help instructors tackle a perennial challenge in teaching one of the classic works of Spanish literature: Miguel de Cervantes's "Don Quixote." Many instructors teaching the novel for the first time may feel overwhelmed at the prospect of helping students appreciate the numerous ways in which Cervantes references the…

In face-to-face conversation, it's easy to react with shock and moralism to the incivility enabled by social media, easy to lament that we live in an era when communication has gone wrong. The digital era, however has also reinvigorated voice--both written and spoken--in other, less toxic, ways. We've seen a resurgence in oral composition (think:…

While "Rebecca" is not currently a set text for A-Level English Literature, this paper argues that the novel's multi-faceted richness would justify its inclusion in any list of recommended texts. Divided into four interconnected parts, the paper offers, firstly, some approaches to the reading and teaching of fiction, generally. The…

This paper explores the role of fairy tales in relation to literacy, affective learning, self-authoring and narrative quest. The study examines fairy tales in the context of the New Literacy Studies with regard to improving cognitive, linguistic and creative writing skills for adult literacy learners.

This essay poses the question of the role that literary knowledge plays in subject English. It thus engages with current debates, largely prompted by Michael Young's call to 'bring knowledge back in', about the need to restore academic knowledge as the basis of the school curriculum. We take issue with Young's understanding of knowledge, arguing…

This article reports on what three white critical whiteness scholars learned about the ways white supremacy was affirmed and resisted during a two-day improvisational, critical whiteness workshop. The authors relied on critical literacy to theorise the castle as a sign or text with implicit, racial meaning. Furthermore, the authors use…

This is discussion of one of Leo Tolstoy's fictional dramatisations of aggressive but dull-witted pedagogy. In "Anna Karenina," two adults badger a lively, deep-souled, active-minded boy, Anna's son Seryozha, to learn his rote-lessons.

Working within a multiliteracies framework, this paper moves beyond the traditional concerns with comprehension of a video text or the use of video for communicative purposes and demonstrates how a film clip might be used in a language classroom to explore the meaning-making process in film. Specifically, I investigate how language, filmic…

Research on academic literacies has predominately focused on writing practices in higher education. To account for writing practices in the digital age, this paper emphasizes the importance of extending the focus of academic literacies beyond writing to include multimodal composition. Drawing on social semiotics, we put forward a framework for…

English writing is one of the four indispensable skills that English learners need to master, but unfortunately, many Chinese college students have much difficulty composing clear, concise and coherent essays although they have studied English for at least over six years. To address the problem, the researchers and teachers in China have tried…

Although the aims of literary study have often been spelled out in ethical terms, scholars have tended to discuss the how of literary interpretation in more ethically neutral terms. Reading pedagogical enactments of two predominant theories of literary interpretation--New Criticism and reader response--through the lens of Rancièrean ethics, I…

This paper aims to explore whether the teaching of the abstract literary concepts of symbolism, narrative perspective and style to young readers can be made more effective by the study of art in an art museum context. The research is an interpretive qualitative case study exploring the learning of 6 participants within a class of 28 students aged…

According to Peha (2016), fiction is all about character. What a character wants, how they go about getting it, and how they change throughout the trajectory of the narrative are key factors that drive a story and make it meaningful. This paper integrates strategies from both narratology (Nikolajeva, 2002; 2005; Rimmon-Kenan, 2002) and linguistics…