How might historians of education bring joy to their work and make our scholarship of use to the world? This article suggests returning to Welland Hendrick's 1909 "A Joysome History of Education." This minor but well-circulated text uses humour and irony to poke fun at some of the more obtuse, sacrosanct, and self-righteous aspects of…

This paper examines literacy as a sociocultural, personal and human practice dependent on and derived through relationships between people, settings and culture. Drawing on a recent empirical research study that combines learner, teacher and author perspectives [Curtin (2023) "Reading and Writing Pathways Through Children's and Young Adult…

This paper reports on a short project undertaken with student English teachers during their one year Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) teaching course that considered the potential inclusion of the novella "The Woman of Colour" into their teaching. The research considers how the student teachers received the text and the…

This quasi-experimental study examined readers' perceptions of content-evaluative metadiscourse--linguistic and rhetorical signals that indicate an author's willingness (or lack thereof) to "own" the claims discussed in a text. Specific elements investigated in the study included hedging and boosting (markers of doubt or certainty),…

Students in the English Language Arts classroom have access to more author commentary than ever. While following authors on social media may deepen students' engagement with their assigned reading, it also threatens to subdue students' own interpretations of the authors' texts. This essay explains how educators can introduce basic aspects of…

The underrepresentation of women and girls in children's picture books and the use of gender stereotypes persists, as seen in a sample of 335 books published between 2010 and 2020. Previous research showed a significant lack of female representation in children's picture books and stereotyped presentation. A pilot study was conducted to establish…

Metadiscourse guides how readers interact with a text and process the information they find. Because texts differ in purpose and audience, so do patterns of metadiscourse use. This research examines the patterns of metadiscourse use in topic-based writing, developed following a structured authoring method. The resulting writing is modular,…

Much research exists about adolescent reading, particularly young adult literature (Allington, 2014; Gallagher & Kittle, 2018; Krashen, 2009). Within that body of research are explorations of nontraditional reading experiences among today's adolescents. This research includes gaming narratives (Ellison & Drew, 2019; Hall, 2011; Sylven…

Recent scholarship in multiliteracies-oriented pedagogies has advocated for greater attention to fostering 'textual thinking', understood as forms of literacy that consider the complexities of semiotic choices made by authors, and their underlying meanings, rhetorical purposes, and cultural contexts. This kind of engagement with texts calls upon…

In this article, Anders Öhman discusses Gert J. J. Biesta's concept of the risk of education and what it could mean for the study of literature in the classroom. The article's point of departure is Bakhtin's theory of the utterance. The utterance, for Bakhtin, has to be embodied, that is, it has to be governed by a purpose: it must be uttered by…

Authors reflect the cultural codes of the societies they live in. When these cultural codes are decoded by the reader, it becomes easier to perceive the work in many aspects and make textual productions from the text. In this study, Iranian author Samed Behrengi's 10 story books which have also been popular in Turkey have been analysed in terms of…

When preparing specialists of Oriental studies, reading fiction in the language being studied is very effective for mastering a foreign language. The fiction text reflects not only the richness of a language and style, but also features of the development of the standard language and changes in its lexical composition. It is also expedient not…

This essay seeks to recognise the value in a literature-focused model of the discipline of English, using I.A. Richards, C.K. Ogden and the American New Critics as models of critics who placed the text, and the reader's relationship with the text, at the centre of any study of literature, arguing that this relationship is analogous to that which…

The goals of this research are to analyze, explore, disrupt, and (re)create modes of being and knowing in relation to text. In particular, we focus on the educational research text. We are asking author-readers to theorize materially: Who does this journal article think you are? And further, Who could I become if I use this as raw material, as…

The present study aims at presenting a thorough account of the field termed literary pragmatics which emerges in a consequence of applying the different pragmatic approaches to the study and analysis of literary genera. Additionally, it also attempts to explore and shed some light on the relationship between the two domains: pragmatics and…