Students in the English Language Arts classroom have access to more author commentary than ever. While following authors on social media may deepen students' engagement with their assigned reading, it also threatens to subdue students' own interpretations of the authors' texts. This essay explains how educators can introduce basic aspects of…

When preparing specialists of Oriental studies, reading fiction in the language being studied is very effective for mastering a foreign language. The fiction text reflects not only the richness of a language and style, but also features of the development of the standard language and changes in its lexical composition. It is also expedient not…

The present study aims at presenting a thorough account of the field termed literary pragmatics which emerges in a consequence of applying the different pragmatic approaches to the study and analysis of literary genera. Additionally, it also attempts to explore and shed some light on the relationship between the two domains: pragmatics and…

In addition to being one of the authors of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), David Coleman has become the Standards' "most visible advocate" (Smith, Appleman, & Wilhelm, 2014, p. 10) and one of their "most prominent and articulate promoters" (Rabinowitz & Bancroft, 2014, p. 4). In a talk titled "Bringing the…

This article proposes a theoretical framework for understanding the possibility of Talmudic stories (as well as other narratives and scenes of interactions among two or more characters) to nurture the growth of the moral imagination as it is expressed in two related but distinct ways. At the intersection of work by educators, literary critics, and…

The Common Core generally eschews mandating texts in favor of promoting critical analysis and rigor. So it's significant that Shakespeare is the only author invoked in imperatives. His explicit inclusion offers a significant opportunity for educators to rethink how we approach Shakespearean instruction. Rather than the traditional learning of…

Why do educators teach literature? The author thinks they can hear the answer in the voice of Huckleberry Finn and David Copperfield and Holden Caulfield and the omniscient narrator in "Beloved." It's the wonderful sound of those words, the gorgeous flow of those well-crafted sentences, and the marvelous way Twain and Dickens and Morrison and…

Bullying remains a wretched, pervasive problem in the society, especially for teenagers. Bullying is commonly defined as negative acts that occur repeatedly and involve an imbalance of power (Olweus 413); since this widely accepted definition excludes one-time acts of cruelty, the authors prefer to use the word "conflict" in their conversations…

This paper explores beginning pre-service teaching students' common perceptions of the meaning of the term literacy. The methodology used is described in terms of phenomenographic analyses and the outcome, an array presentation of concepts in diagrammatic form. It establishes that students' conceptions of literacy are embedded predominantly in the…

In this paper we look at what the critical tradition in education has to offer to the phenomenon of social media. Through an overview and evaluation of the approaches advocated by practitioners of critical literacy and critical media literacy, we illustrate the limitations of applying these frameworks to the fluid and densely interwoven spaces of…

Building on the work developed by Morrell (2003) on critical textual production, this paper provides a glimpse into a critical text produced by a student during a summer research seminar at a West Coast University. This paper highlights the process of critical textual production, the writing that resulted from this method and how a critical…

One of the major problems from which students suffer has to do with reading: reading with diligence, understanding, and, ideally, with the pleasure that attends discovery. Many students have long been hermeneutical-readers-of-a-sort. The problem has deep roots in a widely diffused media and technocyber environment that thins down and disperses the…

As an approach to literary study, critical literacy is not a widespread practice in New Zealand secondary schools. This article draws on a major project on teaching literature in the multicultural classroom that take place over two years in 2008-2009. In it we report on a case study where a Year 13 English teacher designed and tested a novel…

This paper uses the example of an extra-curricular Graphic Novel Reading Group in order to explore the institutional critical reading practices that take place in English classrooms in the senior years of secondary school. Drawing on Stanley Fish's theory of interpretive communities, it questions the restrictive interpretive strategies applied to…

Teaching literary theory is fascinating for those who love the application of theory to a literary text, difficult for those who are of the opinion that theory destroys the actual beauty and value of the fictional source, and unfortunately often boring for those who are taught. This article, however, provides a popular approach to the introduction…