This narrative research study explores the reading responses of eight intermediate-grade girls reading global children's literature in an after-school literature circle over a five-month period. Situated in sociocultural perspectives and transactional theory in an aesthetic stance to the text, this study considers the power of critical dialogue in…

Reading comprehension is the goal of reading, and making inferences is vital. Authors usually expect readers to make multiple types of inferences, including anaphoric, background knowledge, predictive, and retrospective. Common core assessments include all of these, yet instructional materials focus mostly on only one type, retrospective. This…

Leisure reading behavior is a key predictor of educational success. Transportability is a trait that determines how likely an individual is to become involved in a story, and past research has suggested that involvement may be related to leisure reading behavior. However, available measures of transportability have not been validated with children…

Frequently, when assigned to read, intermediate and middle grade students engage in a mindless encounter with the text. Or, try as they may to focus and gather information, they're mostly confused and not sure how to repair the breakdown in their meaning-making. With the new focus on close reading--and on engaging students with more rigorous…

Presents a teacher's method of staying in touch with his students' cognitive development. Offers his outline of four cognitive levels, with definitions, and types of student responses (from sixth- and eighth-grade students). (SR)

Presents a letter from a sixth-grade student to the author and presents his response letter which are found in a compilation of author/reader correspondence called "Letters of Hope." Discusses the role of the storyteller and considers if writers of young adult literature feel an obligation to provide hope for their readers. (SG)

Analyzes the conversation of sixth grade children in literature response groups. Finds and describes two distinctive gendered styles of talk about literature, the predominate female mode of response being the "discourse of feeling," and the predominate male mode of response being the "discourse of action." Discusses pedagogy…

Investigates the relative contribution and trade-off effects of children's knowledge and reading skill in text comprehension. Finds that domain knowledge and reading skill can be traded in order to achieve similar levels of comprehension. Suggests that reading skill compensates for deficient knowledge and specific knowledge compensates for…

Encourages students to slow down and to reflect upon what they had read. Focuses on the visual arts, particularly for their capacity to help move students from the concrete to the abstract. Notes that Lowry's (1993) novel "The Giver" particularly lent itself to this approach because its powerful visual imagery encourages readers to return to and…

A study investigated whether fourth graders recall different amounts of information for passages of different emotional orientation, whether there is a relationship between their emotional response to the passage and the amount of information recalled, and whether they recall different relationships when they read passages of different emotional…

Explores sixth graders' perspectives on the contexts of reading and responding to books in school. Finds children respond to books in patterns specific to school contexts; classroom contexts are socially constructed through children's interactions; and children constructed a community of readers by interacting with one another to respond to books…

This study applied Reader Response theory (which stresses an aesthetic experience with the text) with seven less proficient readers (learning-disabled fifth and sixth graders). Student response was best when the text was read to them, when their responses were oral, and when instruction focused on active meaning construction and the reader/text…

Explores aesthetic responses to literature by examining the responses of fifth graders to a variety of books and films. Finds three main characteristics of students' responses: picturing a story in their minds; extending a story or hypothesize about it while reading; and relating associations and feelings evoked while reading and responding.…

Examines the effect of training fourth-grade children to use the regulation strategy of rereading as a means of answering questions about previously read text. Finds that subjects trained in the rereading strategy used the strategy more often and were more likely to produce correct responses than were control subjects. (RS)

Focuses on guiding readers toward making informed decisions about choosing appropriate paths through and beyond the text. Points out that this type of reading program can work as well for intermediate grade readers as it does for primary readers. (ET)