Critical approaches to literature in secondary English require greater attention to narrative discourse. In this conceptual article, I provide interpretative tools from contemporary narratology and demonstrate their critical potential for high school English. In particular, I outline critical literacy's vital but overattentive focus on the…

This article describes a qualitative study conducted by two researchers who are teacher educators and a literacy coach in a private school. The purpose was to determine the effectiveness of a set of strategies for reading and teaching about graphic novels by examining the responses of three elementary-grade teachers in a reading workshop…

This article presents the results of five open-ended surveys administered to two Advanced Placement classes in a primarily White high school in upstate New York. Surveys sought to explore how students make sense of the course diversity selection, Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart," which was inserted into a primarily White textual…

Although there is a great deal of available material on using nontraditional resources for teaching sociology, the pedagogical uses of science fiction have not been examined for 20 years. This essay first asserts the need for an update based on changes in society and in science fiction over the past two decades. The paper then focuses on the uses…

While research has repeatedly found evidence that readers infer characters' emotions, we investigate three outstanding questions about the content and time course of such inferences. We ask whether even simple narratives give rise to emotion inferences, in what form such inferences are encoded into long-term memory, and whether they are uniquely…

This study was based on an innovation project at the university level with English as a Foreign Language pre-service teachers. This experience was implemented with several language levels in different academic periods of the programme. The project aimed to apply a technological tool such as StoryboardThat, in contrast to the traditional…

This article deals with an educational practice that involved mainstreaming students taking Swedish as a second language and others taking Swedish as a first language. It explores the fiction-reading teaching practice in this mainstreaming framework, a matter of which has been intensely debated internationally. Three upper secondary classes and…

Literature has been repeatedly recognized as an effective source of authentic materials in EFL classrooms. Literature exposes learners to coherent and expert writing which can enable them to write better and facilitates students' creative writing skills. The purpose of this study was to investigate the teaching procedures of using short fiction in…

In this study, the authors explored a selection of middle-grade multimodal novels in order to push back against prior scholarship that tended to dismiss images in novels as mere decorations, visual reiterations of informational ready provided through written language (Godfrey, 2012). Inspired by the notion that the format of the middle-grade novel…

The present study examined how 20 sixth-grade students made meaning while reading graphic novels. Participants completed multiple tasks during a 6-week period. Data sources comprised 1 reading survey, 2 teacher-student conferences, 5 small-group discussions, 1 visual stopping points assignment, and multiple journal entries. Grounded theory methods…

Strong oral reading fluency skills are an important indication of good reading. In addition, reading engagement is often correlated with reading success. Unfortunately, students with learning disabilities (LD) often struggle to read fluently and engage with text. Incorporating graphic novels as part of a comprehensive reading program may help…

Recent research into Japanese as a foreign language education has strongly emphasized the link between Japanese popular culture and learning Japanese. However, these studies have only targeted Japanese language learners in formal education contexts and have largely ignored those who are not studying Japanese or studying Japanese informally. This…

Among the many factors contributing to the historical lack of reading gains of our Black male students is the absence of texts accurately and authentically representing African American characters in today's schools. In addition, well-meaning educators are not adept in identifying and selecting these types of texts in order to provide African…

Reading rate, usually measured in words per minute, is a common operationalization of reading fluency in second language (L2) research and pedagogy. However, the impact of word length is often not addressed. This paper presents two studies showing how the number of characters in a text influences L2 reading time, independent of word counts, within…

Recently, education and literacy researchers have acknowledged educational merit in guided reading that incorporates interactive and authentic reading texts, such as graphic novels, which meet the needs of today's predominantly multimodal learners ( Jennings, Rule, & Zanden, 2014; Kist & Pytash, 2015). This qualitative study explores…