Blending narrative portraiture and feminist methods, this study explored the lives of two rural women who are creative writers. The study asked (1) What are their critical purposes? and (2) How did gender and place intersect in their writing lives? The findings were that the women used creative writing to engage in praxis by creating and…

This article draws on Philip Barnard's model of the interactions between theory and practice, between basic and applied research, to investigate the paradox of reading as an experience both private and public. It uses internal reader experience as a starting point for exploration, evoking the concept of a readerly sense of presence as a selection…

Research indicates that feeling is fundamental to the multilayered experience of literary interpretation. However, despite great strides in U.S. high school classrooms, discussions about literature are still often characterized by known-answer discourses that exclude feeling. This article builds on small-scale studies of affective evaluation, an…

This article shares insights from a symposium celebrating the retirement of P. David Pearson, one of the most influential reading researchers of the last half-century. Presenters addressed the nature, instruction, and assessment of reading comprehension, teacher learning and comprehension, and the texts and contexts of comprehension. Collectively,…

This multiple case study is part of a larger investigation of literacy practices in "Our Home," an after-school program that provides learning support to children from refugee backgrounds. I asked, "What happens when translingual children from refugee backgrounds respond to multicultural, transnational, and translingual…

In a recent article published in this journal, Shanahan, Shanahan, and Misischia investigated the differences in how chemists, historians, and mathematicians read text specific to their disciplines. Unlike the chemists and historians, the pair of mathematicians in this study did not consider sources when reading and evaluating their text. In this…

Facilitating students' acquisition of higherorder thinking skills is imperative in the 21st century. Although some types of text have been shown to enhance higherorder thinking, the effects of many novel forms of text have yet to be investigated. As such, the purpose of the present study was to explore the extent to which a relatively novel form…

Graphic novels in the K-12 classroom are most often used to motivate marginalized readers because of the lower text load and assumption of easy reading. This assumption has thus far been unexplored by reading research. This qualitative multiple-case study utilized think-aloud protocols in a new attention-mapping activity to better understand how…

This mixed-methods study explored (a) the purposes for which teachers selected video clips of their own literacy teaching and assessment practices to share and discuss with peers, (b) how these purposes were related to the content of the discussions, and (c) what variables were related to teachers' generation of new ideas and future actions that…

The purpose of this study is to describe educationally relevant differences in literacy use among three subject-matter disciplines--history, chemistry, and mathematics. These analyses were drawn from an investigation of the teaching of disciplinary literacy in high schools. The purpose of the overall project was to improve the literacy-teaching…

This article reports on two studies investigating reader stance, navigation, and response in expository hypertext. Subjects in the studies included 69 and 147 adult readers prompted to adopt either an efferent or aesthetic stance when reading a 36-node expository hypertext. Reading was followed by recall and essay writing tasks. Results of the…

This paper begins with the assumption that the interpretive practices people acquire in social worlds often transfer to their stances toward and interpretations of worlds encountered in literature (Beach, Thein, & Parks, 2007). The goal of this paper is to identify the history and logic behind one student's negative, ambivalent, and positive…

Notes undergraduate students read both a one-sided text on educational reform and a two-sided nonrefutational text on the V-chip; and that they completed topic-specific beliefs, knowledge, and interest measures and reacted to specific text characteristics. Finds that although both forms of texts affected readers, the effects varied by the type of…

Argues that the most common use of reader-response theory in the classroom is misguided in its emphasis on personal response and identification. Discusses the social and political nature of readers, texts, and contexts. Suggests that when a text is about characters whose life and culture are very different from the reader's, it can heighten the…

The purpose of this study was to develop an understanding of adolescent use of instant messaging. Grounded in the New Literacy Studies stance that literacy is a social practice embedded in local contexts and informed by global ideologies (Street, 1995), I argue that participation in digital literacies such as instant messaging has implications for…