Purpose: This paper encourages teachers and scholars of English Language Arts to engage deliberately with literary ambiguity. Design/methodology/approach: Through close attention to ambiguous moments in commonly taught texts, the essay argues that explicit attention to ambiguity can support four enduring goals in the field: fostering social…

This article is a discussion of some aspects of reader response. It attempts to track the development of various theories: from the view of the text as an entity set in stone, through structuralist and phenomenological arguments, to the point where the text becomes a virtual dimension. But not only is the importance of the text within the literary…

This paper explores the application of texture and textual attractors within a cognitive stylistic pedagogy for English teachers. Texture, defined as the feeling of building and experiencing a fictional world, is here taken up as a facilitative way of thinking about how reading, language, experience and cognition operate in the classroom. On the…

Since pairing the classics with young adult literature can increase reading comprehension and spark interest amongst our students, this essay explores a unit plan for connecting Will Hobbs's "Downriver" (1991) with William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" (1954). Both works espouse significant and timely themes: the importance of…

My argument is that a literary education should build on a primary level of responsivity towards literature, involving empathy and immersion in the world of the text. To engage with literary works from the past involves a play between familiarity and strangeness, and this play should be located as part of a reader's response to texts, rather than…

Based on a 1-year interview-based case study of a preservice English teacher, this article considers the limitations of both intersectional literacies and reader-based responses to texts. In an effort to address students' problematic discussions of female sexuality, the participant implemented a queer pedagogy that emphasized alterity, or the…

Literature for children and youth has long played a pivotal role in growing students' literacy lives in schools. Fine literature, whether self-selected by students as choice reading or paired with teachers' thoughtful instruction, can launch students into personally meaningful and intellectually stimulating opportunities to read, respond,…

This article draws on research into using reader-response theory as a way of thinking about teaching grammar and poetry in the English classroom. Framing my discussion around world-based models of reader-response such as Transactional Theory (Rosenblatt 1938, 1978) and Text World Theory (Gavins 2007; Werth 1999), I argue that this approach is…

This paper details the visual responses created by a group of preservice teachers reading a series of contemporary graphic novels about adolescence. Visual response is here understood as an interpretive methodology of transmediation, informed by theorists of multimodal literacies as well as particular forms of psychoanalytic inquiry related to…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate why reading aloud (RA), both by teachers and students, is such a common practice in high school classrooms. In particular, this investigation considers students' views of why RA is practised and what are its effects. Design/methodology/approach: The paper presents the results of two small focus…

This article reflects on the values and practices of a revolutionary A level (senior secondary) course that achieved a high degree of validity and reliability in assessing the study of English literature. John Hodgson and Bill Greenwell were involved in its teaching and assessment from an early stage, and Greenwell's comments on an early draft of…

Although secondary school teachers have long been aware of the pedagogical possibilities of Louise Rosenblatt's Reader Response (articulated first in "Literature as Exploration," 1938) and I. A. Richards' Close Reading (first broached in "The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of…

Focusing on the creative writing of Year 6 boys as they make the transition to Year 7, this article establishes a theoretical model for creative writing as response. In line with Bakhtin's notion of utterances as 'interpersonal' (1986), the model demonstrates the complexity of creative writing -- the text is influencing of and influenced by an…

The following narrative reflects on the dilemmas and problems faced by inexperienced researchers working within the field of education. Focusing on a research project completed in fulfilment of an MA in Teaching and Learning, the article recounts the decisions made by one emergent researcher and evaluates how far the chosen methods may have helped…

Reader-response has become one of the most influential literary theories to inform the pedagogies of middle and secondary English classrooms. However, many English and literacy educators have begun to advocate for more critical and culturally responsive versions of reader-response pedagogies, arguing that teachers move beyond valuing students'…