In this article, I use the metaphor that readers journey to narrative worlds to review research that has spanned my career. In the first section, I consider the processes that enable readers to undertake these journeys as well as the processes that allow them to participate in the narrative worlds once they have arrived. In the second section, I…

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.…

When two people read the same story, they might both end up liking it very much. However, this does not necessarily mean that their reasons for liking it were identical. We therefore ask what factors contribute to "liking" a story, and--most importantly--how people vary in this respect. We found that readers like stories because they…

This paper attempts to provide a new understanding of the gutter and how it is used to significant effect in Gene Luen Yang's, Boxers & Saints. This research draws upon the work of Scott McCloud to establish a framework for the theoretical applications of the gutter. Most prior research focuses on the gutter within the page. This article…

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…

Classrooms are noisy: when children are engaged in solo work, they also hear background babble, noise from outdoor, and people moving around. Few studies investigating the effects of noise on academic tasks use naturalistic stimuli. Questions also remain regarding why some children are more impaired by noise than others. This study compared…

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),…

We conducted a systematic review of research involving K-12 students that examined associations among individual differences factors (e.g., working memory) and intertextual integration. We identified 25 studies published in 23 peer-reviewed journal articles and two dissertations/theses. These examined a wide range of individual difference factors,…

Background: School-aged children are increasingly engaging with multiple conflicting texts to understand complex societal issues; however, empirical research has not yet examined in what ways contextual factors affect detection of and memory for conflicts. Methods: The current experiment manipulated contextual factors that included the vocabulary…

Oliver Jeffers' best-selling picturebook "How to Catch a Star" (2004) has been the subject of several recent theatre adaptations for children. This paper provides a detailed case study of the 2017 stage adaptation created by the Irish-language theatre-company, Branar Téatar do Pháistí; an adaptation that has been highly praised for the…

Existing work on literacy and affect has posed important questions for how we think about meanings and how and where they get made. The authors contribute to such work by focusing on the relation between text and affect. This is a topic that has received insufficient attention in recent work but is of pressing concern for education as text…

A reader's ability to go beyond their surface-level understanding of words and to build a deeper representation of the text in their mind (i.e., reading comprehension) is predicated on a range of reader- and text-level variables that indicate how well a certain reader can read a certain text. The following study evaluates the extent to which the…

The study investigated the relationships among quality dimensions, three types of interactions (i.e. learner-content, learner-instructor, and learner-learner interaction), perceived learning and learning satisfaction with flipped courses in the context of the flipped classroom based on the information system (IS) success model. In this study, the…

Blending narrative portraiture and feminist methods, this study explored the lives of two rural women who are creative writers. The study asked (1) What are their critical purposes? and (2) How did gender and place intersect in their writing lives? The findings were that the women used creative writing to engage in praxis by creating and…

Maori and Pacific learners in Aotearoa New Zealand have been identified as 'priority learners' by the Ministry of Education. The 'Pacific picturebook project' is ongoing research focussed on picturebooks selected to support the languages, cultures, and identities of Pacific learners in keeping with our government, Teaching Council and Ministry of…