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…

The prevalence of the acronym tl;dr ("too long; didn't read") suggests that people intentionally disengage their attention from long sections of text. We studied this real-world phenomenon in an educational context by measuring rates of intentional and unintentional mind-wandering while undergraduate student participants (n = 80) read…

This article presents pedagogical reflections on the experience of teaching fiction about the partition of India with Pakistan and Bangladesh and its long-lasting effects on local communities, especially along the borders. It shows how the long drawn out political movement for identity and territory, including the violence and social divisions it…

Student engagement in online learning is an essential component of course design. To ensure that students are engaged in the course, various strategies can help students interact with the content. This study focuses on determining gender differences in learner perspectives on how engaging learner-content interactions can be in an online learning…

This article argues that despite students facing obstacles when studying remotely and online through the COVID-19 pandemic, some are able to overcome barriers to achieve their academic goals. While formal methods are used to evaluate teaching and learning, the five teacher educator researchers in this study sought to understand pre-service…

One teacher encourages her students to write in the margins of the novels they are reading. These notes then turned to conversations about social justice issues and history when the books were passed to family members. The conversations in the margins were jumping-off points for conversations in class, and then students invited members of the…

This paper investigates readers' recognition of unsourced evidentials in texts in association with critical reading. To this end, we involved four Iranian postgraduate students at an Australian university in a collective case study where each student read four Persian texts and participated in in-depth interviews and focus group discussions. Data…

This article explores the potential for engaging 7 and 8-year-old school pupils in performative literature interpretation through process drama. Inspired by new materialism and affect theory, we focus on how literature interpretations come into being in dramatic fiction, and on how these becoming interpretations merge with the classroom. The study…

Background: Executive function (EF) plays a crucial role in children's reading. However, previous studies were based on offline products of reading comprehension. Online research is needed to reveal the core mechanisms underlying children's reading processing. By measuring children's working memory (WM) and cognitive flexibility (CF), we…

This paper uses a Gwen Harwood poem to open up questions of "knowing" around the teaching of Literature. Following our own brief reading of the poem, we particularly discuss ways in which questions of knowing/knowledge have been considered in Literature teaching historically, such as: - the binary of "knowledge" and…

This article explores the relationship between low- and high-level aspects of reading by studying the interplay between word processing, as measured with eye tracking, and narrative absorption and liking, as measured with questionnaires. Specifically, we focused on how individual differences in sensitivity to lexical word characteristics--measured…

Verbal text and images constitute the principal semiotic modes interacting to produce interpersonal meanings in multimodal science texts for young children. These meanings relate to pedagogical perceptions about children's learning. This study examined verbal text-image relations regarding the interpersonal meaning dimensions of address (the way…

This article draws on Philip Barnard's model of the interactions between theory and practice, between basic and applied research, to investigate the paradox of reading as an experience both private and public. It uses internal reader experience as a starting point for exploration, evoking the concept of a readerly sense of presence as a selection…

What can the affective turn mean for literacy educators who believe their work can lay the foundation for a life filled with meaningful reading pursuits, for students who "become" readers and "do" reading? Because reading occurs across and within an elaborate composite of time, space, relationships, histories, discourses, and…

Scholars in college learning and writing studies have argued that reading has an image problem: we have trouble "seeing" it. This study contributes to making reading visible by collecting a series of images used by faculty and students enrolled in first-year experience courses. Qualitative analysis of interviews with five faculty and 34…