Poetry spaces provide a place where young people can express themselves and develop skills like critical thinking, empathy, and creativity. They empower young people, particularly those at the margins of society. I organized an extracurricular poetry club, Yo Misma, with Latina adolescents in which we read the work of ten Latin American women…

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…

Purpose: This study aims to explore the textual and sociopolitical relationships of kinship writing as 15 youth wrote politically charged poetry while participating in a four-week summer writing program grounded in a Black studies curriculum. Design/methodology/approach: The authors explore the following research questions: How do youth writers…

Keri Franklin has proposed that creating the appropriate social-emotional environment for peer response (or peer conferencing, as she calls it) is a necessary first step. Within the context of her peer response process, though, are there strategies that can be adopted that would further scaffold students' ability to take each other's work…

Reflecting on 45 years of teaching and research, Lee Galda argues that practice based on transactional theory is essential for the effective teaching of literature.

After briefly reviewing how reading is conceptualised in the "Progress in International Reading Literacy Study" and the English National Curriculum, this article examines two unofficial reading activities in a class of 10-11-year-olds' to see how far these activities match up with the official definitions of reading, or whether they…

Throughout adolescence, children begin to develop their life story: a coherent account of their experiences and selfhood. Although the nature of this development is still being uncovered, one promising direction for research is the examination of factors that could encourage life story development. Here the authors explore the idea that exposure…

In English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms, where acquisition of English is the ultimate goal, one of the main tasks for the teacher is to provide students with language input and activities that best aid them in their learning process. As different researchers have reported, including poetry-based activities in the EFL classroom is…

This article takes as its starting point the idea that policies of "personalising learning" and promoting "creativity" raise issues for assessment which the present framework for assessment and testing in schools in England and Wales does little to address. It explores the notion, also touched on elsewhere in this issue, of a…

Assuming that readers' emotional responses can enhance readers' metacognitive experiences and inform literary analysis, this study of 11th-grade poetry readers features instruction that models both cognitive and affective reading processes. The author: (1) Presents a case for more explicit attention to emotion in language arts classrooms; (2)…

In this article, the author redefines "text" and "poem" so that attention will be focused on the reader. The text, she argues, lies inert on the page until the reader comes along and brings it to life in the act of reading, reacting, and reflecting. A poem, then, must be thought of as an event in time. It is not an object or an ideal entity. It is…

Discusses the conflict over deconstruction, explaining its usefulness in reading, writing, and responding to poetry. After defining deconstruction, presents five approaches to deconstructive reading (self-referentiality, reading from different positions, binary oppositions, figurative/literal language, and intertextuality) and concludes that…

Reasons that teachers of literature should have as their focus not what writers do but what readers do in the process of reading literature. Concludes that readers construct literary works based on their own experience, education, and ability to imagine in response to a writer's suggestions. (JAD)

Uses the author's poems to illustrate the interrelationships among a poem's rhythm, lineation, and syntax. (MM)

Presents the third part of a six-part series in which the authors respond to a ninth grader's first impressions of "Reel One," a poem by Adrien Stoutenburg. Urges readers to participate by reading the student's impressions and reflecting on the student's interpretations. (MM)