In schools across the country and world, students enter classrooms with rich diversity in backgrounds, identities, and experiences. They speak hundreds of different languages, come from countries around the world, espouse nuanced cultural and gender identities, and have an array of abilities and interests. But texts in school and classroom…

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…

To promote independent reading in middle school, teachers must understand why adolescents choose to read or not read a specific book. Yet, there is limited research on the factors that students consider when evaluating books that teachers have introduced them to in class. This study aimed to describe factors that 43 Grade 7 and 8 students noted as…

The state of reading to meet a person's needs develops over time, and this habit becomes a part of the person's life. In this study, a focus group interview was the preferred method of qualitative research. High-level readers who read more than 30 books a year were included in the study. Even though they read about 30 to 100 books a year, they…

Previous research has established relationships between reading fiction and increased empathy levels, an effect amplified by reading young adult fiction and by feeling transported by, or wholly immersed within, one's reading. Given the established correlation between increased empathy and decreased intolerance levels, reading fiction may decrease…

Disasters, natural and human-made, occur within children's lives and often have traumatic effects on their well-being. Early childhood educators must be prepared to support children's social-emotional learning related to disasters. When teachers use quality picturebooks for interactive read-alouds, they can promote opportunities for children to…

Reading motivation is a fundamental basis for reading behavior and performance. For learners, interest is an exceedingly important component of reading motivation. Prior research has shown that students' text-based interest varies significantly between texts. However, it is still unclear why one text elicits greater interest over another.…

This study explores the relationship between the books students select for independent reading and their motivation to read. Instructional recommendations based on key findings are presented. To gather data, study participants completed the Motivation to Read Profile-Revised. They also shared information about the books they had selected for…

This article is based on the premise that mandated reading in literature classrooms may be perceived as an imposition and disliked by students. Attempts to address that scenario have suggested that text selection should be given more consideration to promote reading engagement, particularly by choosing texts which are familiar to the lifeworlds of…

We explored potential profiles of interest, attitudes, and source evaluation by performing cluster analysis in a sample of Norwegian upper-secondary students. Differences among the profile groups with regard to multiple-document use were examined. The profile groups were partly consistent with the default stances described by the…

This article looks past the gifted classics of children's literature to explore the incredible opportunity that is missed all too often: an opportunity to intentionally choose books in which diversity is not the point but showcase much-needed representation. Drawing on the concepts of mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors this article explores…

Helping students engage with complex texts has been a longstanding challenge, though teachers have received little guidance about practices that help students in engaging with texts. This paper provides a range of empirical evidence about a tool designed to provide formative insight into text-focused teaching, which we used to reliably score more…

This research study explores the role of social annotation in supporting dialogic teaching in secondary English language arts. Grounded in Bakhtin's dialogism and building upon research into online discussion, this study describes how a high school English teacher and her students used a digital annotation tool to read and talk about texts.…

This research was a 12-week-long study of six participants attending the same alternative high school in a suburban district in the northeast of the United States. Rosenblatt's Reader Response Theory and interpretative qualitative methodology were used to examine participants' reactions to reading self-selected young adult (YA) literature during…

In a recent classroom-based action research study, the author's adolescent students deepened their informational text comprehension skills over the course of several interactive, strategic shared text studies. As suggested by research and theory, her students appeared to observe and appropriate cognitive, executive, and discourse strategies as…