Connecting the constructs of meaning and experience in the fields of English education, teacher education, literacy and narrative inquiry, "Making Meaning with Readers and Texts" materializes new insights for advancing teacher education research, broadening understandings of teachers' use of literacy practices for making meaning from…

In this article, the author describes three strategies they have used to bolster interest and make use of popular culture to enhance readers' interactions with texts: pop culture pairings, musical connections, and multimodal projects. The author addresses the cultivation of pop culture awareness, the importance of multimodal pedagogy, the…

This personal reflection looks at the benefits of using performance pedagogy in the Shakespeare classroom, both in terms of a general understanding of the period and a student's personal connection to the text. Though the essay acknowledges our profession's ongoing dialogue in this area, it mostly seeks to look at how a student may change once she…

This teaching tip highlights a strategy that assists teachers in structuring classroom discussions about texts. Specifically, this conversational technique helps students think and talk about a text beyond its literal meaning. During classroom conversations that employ this strategy, teachers help students extend their overall understanding of a…

This article explores reading in the English classroom through a cognitive linguistic lens. In particular, we consider how students' ability to engage with a text, which we term authentic reading, can be facilitated or restricted. We draw on two case studies featuring Year 7 students working with the novel Holes (Sachar 2000), and the short story…

This article takes as its focus Lefebvre's trialectic of conceived, perceived and lived spaces as a lens through which to scrutinise the 2013 English Literature Curriculum, and to explore the extent to which creative spaces might exist within that curriculum. The article analyses how the curriculum is envisaged by policymakers and how it might be…

This article addresses approaches to differentiating instruction to meet the needs of students whose literacy needs, interests, and strengths vary widely. This article was designed to support classroom teachers who understand the importance of differentiating instruction, but are unsure of how best to design and implement differentiation within…

When students create personal connections with literature during whole-class discussion, they make sense both of text and of their life experiences. In this article, the author shares tips that help students make text-to-self, text-to-world, and text-to-text connections. She offers classroom examples to illustrate how conversations that encourage…

After teaching in rural North Carolina for about six years, the author was on the verge of giving up on teaching Shakespeare to her students. Although they seemed to enjoy the action and the drama of Shakespeare's plays, the lack of connection between the students and the language and culture of the plays interfered with her ability to generate a…

This article examines how students and teachers at a non-Orthodox Jewish day school in New York City negotiate the use of translation within the context of an institutionalized language policy that stresses the use of a sacred language over that of the vernacular. Specifically, this paper analyzes the negotiation of a Hebrew-only policy through…

Extensive research over the years indicates that there are at least five essential components teachers can include in their classroom to help their students comprehend and learn. These features include: (1) giving background and connecting to students' prior knowledge; (2) providing a strong vocabulary program; (3) setting aside ample opportunity…

Four first-grade teachers used discussion prompts to encourage thinking about and responding to text in different ways. This article describes how the teachers introduced the prompts and provides examples of how the prompts were integrated into classroom activities. Teachers found that using the prompts was an effective way to initiate and…

This exploratory study describes the instructional strategies and related activities a Grade 1 teacher and I used to promote engagements with informational texts in one rural Jamaican primary school. Some of the instructional strategies and activities were bridging connections from the known to the unknown, reading aloud to increase content…

Each year junior high students around the country read S. E. Hinton's 50-year-old tale, "The Outsiders," about life as an adolescent, and devour its universal message of acceptance and stereotype as told through the vision of a teenage author. "The Outsiders" is so effective as a young adult novel because students immediately see the connection S.…

Describes a studio project designed to help students (1) utilize the digital environment to organize typography and images that represent the socio-political context their solutions were required to identify; and (2) explore the empirical variables that help readers to access and contemplate the content presented by their text. (PA)