Designed for teachers in the primary grades, this book provides a number of units outlining possible instructional strategies for teaching folk literature. The book's aim is to help children personally connect with literature so they will continue to love reading throughout their lives. The first chapter offers background on the world of folk…

Teaching a world literature class at a public college presented an opportunity to test Allan Bloom's and E. D. Hirsch, Jr.'s charges that today's college students are not only ignorant of great literature, but also ill-equipped to seriously consider such works. Beginning with a class survey of reading tastes and experiences, it was discovered that…

Educators at Georgia Southern University began using a whole language approach to developmental literacy instruction by adapting the model David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky provide in "Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts." Rather than a focus on information retrieval and transfer, whole language curricula encourage students to engage…

A case study examined the logic of a student's unconventional interpretation of a poem. The subject, an outgoing and well-spoken student from the lower-middle class enrolled in a remedial composition class at the University of California, offered an unconventional reading of a poem by a contemporary Japanese-American writer. Data consisted of…

The fiction writer uses language to create the illusion of reality. A work of fiction is an illusion of life in which characters attempt to transform basic reality by casting their desires and views upon it, thus creating internal conflict between elements of the real and the unreal. Characters must sort out through experiences that enable them to…

An extension of conversations that originally took place at summer institutes devoted to literary theory (sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English), this book presents diverse critical perspectives on current topics of literature, such as post-structuralism, cultural criticism, reader-response theory, and issues of gender and…

A study investigated the relationship between readability of advertising copy and conventional measures of ad readership. It was hypothesized that readership scores would be higher for advertisements containing copy with the highest and lowest computed readership grade levels. Fifty-five full-page advertisements that met arbitrary minimal copy…

After students' interest in literature has been stirred by journal writing, it is time for them to turn their private journal writing into writing for an audience. Instead of having students write the usual responses to literature, vary their assignments by offering them creative responses, either occasionally or as an individual alternative to…

Noting that too many children leave elementary school without developing the ability to use words imaginatively, this paper presents a teaching approach that uses literature to foster invention in children's writing. The approach described is part of a total composition program that structures writing experiences in which children observe…

Although the concept of coherence is elusive, explorations of the historical, theoretical, and empirical discussions of coherence can illuminate, though not eliminate, the concept's elusiveness. There are three inter-related and overlapping ways that readers make coherence. Intratextuality, the notion that readers perceive a text as coherent if it…

Literature is an artistic expression which teaches human beings valuable lessons about life. Literature invites the reader to share decisions with the decisions of others--the characters seen in literature. Unlike science or philosophy or ethics, which make people say "I understand" and then "I see," literature, as an art,…

Representing Australia, Canada, England, the United States, and Wales, this collection of essays focuses on ways in which teachers can adapt classroom activities and modify writing assignments to encourage personal response and exploration of texts. Essays, their authors, and nationalities are as follows: (1) "The River and Its Banks:…

This paper explores some alternative ways to think about critical thinking in the study of literature in the elementary grades. In a review of the research, the paper examines several factors that have shaped, or influenced, the trends in the literature curriculum over the years to determine if and how these factors influenced the teaching of…

The paper presents and demonstrates a heuristic for helping students learn how to read and understand figuration in literature. The heuristic contains elements from linguistics, New Criticism, and rhetorical analysis in a recursive process which enables students to see how features of words combine into figurative patterns. Beginning at the level…

Examines whether "social reading" can facilitate literary engagement. Indicates that social readers made a greater attempt to convey meaning than did nonsocial readers, but were less engaged with the text as literary discourse. (SKC)