Increasing numbers of researchers in the field of higher education research are searching for meaning rather than metrics: something in their data that call to them and that make their hearts soar. This paper leans into post-qualitative approaches and attempts to resist methodological arrest, drawing on the disciplinary language of literary…

Situated in sociocultural theories of language and literacy, the authors describe an approach to teaching nonfiction text to emergent bilinguals (EBs) through the strategic use of a reading protocol. The protocol focuses on "where" reading text is positioned in a learning sequence and "how" students engage with these texts.…

This paper focuses on "How Texts Teach What Readers Learn" (Meek, 1988) and considers how texts teach readers in a digital age. I use Meek's book as a frame for exploring the ways children learn about narration, structure, voice, discourse and language, and becoming an "insider" in the text. To demonstrate this, I use Meek's…

Reading literacy is a multidimensional construct in terms of text and reading processes. Much research has examined the divisibility of the processes underlying reading, but they have treated the rest of the construct as unitary. This study extends the examination of dimensionality to a neglected area in literacy studies. It tests reading models…

Teaching for theme is one aspect of reading comprehension that is often elusive for both teachers and students. Specifically, teachers are challenged with elevating students' thinking from the plot level to a more abstract level when teaching for theme understanding. Students are challenged with transitioning between the story world and the real…

This article adds picturebooks to the rich landscape of middle grades readings. It begins with a vignette that inspired this article, followed by an introduction to the changing definitions picturebooks. Next, it provides a brief overview of the different relationships between text and illustrations. Then, it discusses the value of picturebooks…

Sensory reading refers to reading that engages all six of the human senses - vison, hearing, touch, gustation, olfaction and proprioception. The author proposes that increased attention be paid to the three 'hidden' senses of gustation, olfaction and proprioception to advance innovative reading studies. She articulates the problematic of visually…

This paper reimagines a quintessential literary practice: close reading. The autoethnographic inquiry examines the relationship between a single text and my experience with it as teacher, student, reader and writer: Jennifer Egan's short story "Black Box". In doing so I make a case for the literary as a useful mode for being and teaching…

Perusall, a collaborative reading tool, was introduced in an advanced reading and writing skills course in Hong Kong to increase engagement with texts and encourage critical discussion during the COVID-19 face-to-face class suspension. Students were asked to use the Perusall platform to complete pre-class readings, highlight and annotate text and…

Measuring students' reading motivation is a common practice in literacy classrooms, and results often inform instruction. This mixed-methods study problematizes this practice, raising tensions between how reading motivation is measured and its enactment in a reading class. Key tensions include reading motivation as competition versus a collective…

Automaticity in recognizing the words in a text is fundamental to comprehension. If the number of words readers need to stop and decode exceeds their ability to retain their understanding of a narrative's plot or an expository text's description, their comprehension suffers. The conventional intervention for students who lack the automaticity to…

Wordless picture book reading is one of the common literacy practices for young children that happen at schools and homes. This dissertation of three studies explores the reader-text transactions between young children and wordless picture books in three ways: a content analysis of wordless books potentially featuring characters of color, a…

The activity described in this paper is based on the idea that reading an introductory undergraduate mathematics text is similar to reading instructions. I want my students to think about how to read when the goal is to learn to complete a task. I give them written instructions for doing a card trick and ask them to complete the trick. The…

Slow reading has long been viewed as a teaching technique that engages students more deeply with course readings. Little systematic research, however, has been done to understand how this pedagogical strategy works in college classrooms. This study investigated how slow reading techniques promoted deep learning among undergraduate college students…

Despite recent calls to more fully incorporate multimodal perspectives into literacies research, there is still limited scholarship examining how students critically engage in reading activities by drawing on embodied practices. Racially and linguistically minoritized students are particularly disadvantaged by dominant logocentric and…