Irony is a heavily context-dependent pragmatic phenomenon. But what is it about context that facilitates or blocks irony comprehension? Based on the echoic account, we suggest that a context facilitates irony comprehension when it makes manifest a speaker's intentions and attitude, i.e., when a context makes it easy for participants to engage…

Research in the field of reading has demonstrated the benefits of reading, including increased vocabulary (Anderson et al., 1986; Day et al., 1991) and comprehension (Anderson et al., 1986; Duncan et al., 2016), improved academic skills (Chen et al., 2017; Whitten et al., 2016), enhanced relaxation and pleasure (Gerlich et al., 2012; Kaiser &…

We argue that to understand how readers process narrative, it is necessary to distinguish between psychological stance (i.e., how the narrator evaluates events and characters) and physical perspective (i.e., the angle of view from which events are described). Although these are metaphorically related, the cognitive processes that produce such a…

My experience of people's life stories from my work as a narrative therapist consistently destabilised distinctions between imagined/magical and real experiences. I came to realise that the day-to-day magical realist juxtapositions I came upon were encounters with people's daily lives, as lived, that have remained unacknowledged within the…

Research leadership, a much neglected area of educational leadership and management, is disadvantaged by having an underdeveloped and inadequate knowledge base. This article represents a contribution to this knowledge base through a conceptual analysis. It presents as propositional knowledge an original theoretical model of the componential…

Publishing graded readers is big business, but there is evidence that the texts themselves are not being read in sufficient quantity to improve language proficiency. This article reports on a study of graded readers, focusing on interviews with some major publishers of graded readers, to investigate their production rationales. The findings…

Readers apply their own standards of coherence while reading text. Readers with a low standard of coherence are thought to find a sparse and incomplete representation more coherent than readers who employ a higher standard. This article reports 3 experiments that examined standards of coherence imposed by skilled and less-skilled readers by having…

This article examines the reciprocity between children's literature and educational ideals in Dutch rewritings of international literary classics published for children between 1850 and 1950. It analyses the assumed pedagogical power of rewritings of international literary classics for children from the perspective of three theoretical concepts:…

This mixed-methods study examined romance readers' perceptions of how reading romance novels has impacted their sex lives, feelings about their sex partners, knowledge of sexuality and their sexual behavior. Fifty-three women romance readers over the age of 18 completed an online survey composed of multiple choice and open-ended essay questions. …

In 2006, a secondary English and feminist studies teacher created a course and designed a study around a reading exchange for eighth-grade girls from two vastly different communities. Girls from a school in a northeastern state read young adult novels and wrote about their reading and related topics with girls from Washington, DC on a wikispace…

Wilson asserts that the quest for absolute objectivity in scoring student writing--including the use of rubrics--creates harmful distance between reader and writer and ignores the unique, transactional characteristics of writing. She puts forth the view of Rosenblatt and other literacy theorists that meaning and value of texts are not rigidly…

Two experiments investigated some of the cognitive and affective causes of interest and liking. Results did not support the hypothesis that degree of surprise per se causes interest. The hypothesis that interest and liking arise from different causes was supported. (Author/LMO)

Drawing on her interviews with professional ghostwriters who work primarily in organizations, the author examines what this practice implies about society's current attitudes toward authorship, written work, and literacy in general. She also examines the ethical arguments that various critics of ghostwriting have made. (Contains 3 notes.)

Research into the portrayal of miniature human-like characters in the fictional narratives of art and literature suggests that profound values abound in the miniature. The paper discusses two examples of fairy miniatures, Rudyard Kipling's "Puck" and J. M. Barrie's "Tinker Bell." Little characters, whatever their provenance,…