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…

This study considers reading comprehension as a dialogic transaction of making meaning from text. The concept of text and reading is taken to include the visual and multimodal as well as written forms. Case studies of children discussing texts are analysed to explore how children engage in inter-mental and intra-mental processes of reading,…

After briefly reviewing how reading is conceptualised in the "Progress in International Reading Literacy Study" and the English National Curriculum, this article examines two unofficial reading activities in a class of 10-11-year-olds' to see how far these activities match up with the official definitions of reading, or whether they…

Changes in the teaching of reading during the past decade include a shift away from a previous emphasis on "one-to-one" learning experiences to a focus upon more communal forms of learning which place the teacher center stage. With the teacher's role thus highlighted, teacher-pupil interaction in practice has come under the spotlight, with a…

This article explores ways in which children's picture books form networks of relationships, and their implications for readers and classroom teachers. In this exploration, reading is seen to involve making connections within and beyond the text at hand. These connections, evoked differently across readers, shape readers' interpretations of text.…

This paper presents a pedagogical intervention project conducted in secondary English classrooms in Singapore, entitled "Building Communities of Readers among Teachers." The project is positioned against the dominant instrumentalism of Singaporean approaches to creativity and promotes a socio-cultural stance to creativity and criticality…