Three teachers of first-year composition used cross-grading as a way of extending the student's grasp of interpretive communities as arbiters of value as well as creators of meaning. Students in six sections (two experimental groups) approached the English 101 Common Final in the same manner, discussing a published article and sharing their…

Noting that Katherine Paterson's books are loved by school children everywhere, this paper discusses her engagement with the books she writes and how children respond to them. The paper begins with a brief discussion of the inspiration of one of Katherine Paterson's fairy tales and presents an extended discussion of the motivation behind her…

Urging teachers of poetry writing to better understand themselves as writers and readers, this book "interrogates" a strategy teachers might employ in reading and evaluating student poems. A thoughtful study of a teacher is presented while in the process of evaluating student poetry through the lenses of four different contemporary…

Through personal investigative reporting and compelling writing, H. G. Bissinger in "Friday Night Lights" (1991) explores the culture of high school football from a variety of perspectives including: students, parents, coaches, teachers, school boards, local politicians, community values regarding race, gender and education, regional…

Samuel Yette's "The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America" belongs to an honorable tradition of African American writing, a tradition which draws attention to a necessary distinction between the promise of freedom and democracy and what people actually experience in their everyday lives in the United States. Yette's language…

Many English teachers face the widespread misconception that if a work of fiction is enjoyable, it cannot be good, or, conversely, if it is good, it cannot be enjoyable. Critics of horror fiction, for example, would likely argue that better reading materials are available for students to read. Inclusion of materials other than "classics" into the…

An exercise in ghostwriting--a process where the reader completes a section of the text in the reader's head based on clues in the text--was used in freshman composition and upper-level composition classes to get students to concentrate on their reading processes. In this assignment, a short story was chosen from which different portions of the…

Considering that some feminist critics have recently been approaching composition theory from a preconceived feminist perspective, the issue of maintaining an analytical bias while conducting research is once more emerging. By imposing an analytical model on a body of data, scholars run the risk of ignoring conclusions or focusing on those which…

A study investigated the phenomenon "response to literature" through the window of language to determine how different researchers assigned meaning to this central concept in twentieth century research. The benchmark conceptions of the terms "literature" and "response" (with which the research conceptions could be…

In a composition classroom with a multicultural emphasis, reader response techniques can give students the chance to consider their own positions in the dominant culture, to confront racist attitudes within themselves, and to try to empathize with minority views. These techniques lead to a more student-centered classroom where students not only…

Using an approach developed and refined over a combined 44 years of teaching, this book encourages literature teachers at the high school and college levels to empower their students as readers--and meaning-makers--of literature. The book presents results of a research study in which 288 students, ranging from junior high school to graduate…

A case study examined one fifth-grade student's developing response as he participated in a literature-based reading program. The student's response to text over time was traced via observations of the student, interviews, field notes, and written documents he created. Analysis, ongoing during and after the data collection, focused on three…

This paper recognizes that critics of the "plain language movement" point out that what is "plain" to one audience may mystify and confuse another. It adds that questions such as "Plain language for whom?" and "How can we know whether a text is written in plain language?" raise legitimate concerns about the…

A pilot case study addressed how a reader engages aesthetically with text. The main thrust theoretically is from the notion that "there are possible worlds other than the one we inhabit." Four subjects were chosen out of a total of 63 subjects in grades four through six in an elementary school in Western Canada. Out of the four subjects,…

In the first of two experiments designed to determine whether the use of humor would enhance audience reactions to a speaker without damaging that speaker's ethos (character and authoritativeness), 98 university students were randomly assigned to read one of four versions of the speech, "Why I Chose Psychology." The subjects read…