A detailed teaching model designed to develop effective reading skills in content areas (ERICA) is presented in this document. The paper begins with a discussion of the four stages of the ERICA model: (1) preparing for reading, (2) thinking through information, (3) extracting and organizing information, and (4) translating information. The paper…

Articles in this journal issue explore the relationship between the reader and the literature text, and discuss ways that instruction can enhance reader response to that literature. Following an introduction summarizing the nine articles, the titles and their authors are as follows: (1) "It Is the Poem That I Remake: Using Kenneth Burke's…

These proceedings include papers presented and summarize information and ideas exchanged by teachers and educators concerned with the development of media studies in all sectors of education in Scotland at a 1-day conference. The first part of the conference considered the nature and concept of media studies and the degree to which such studies…

Citing studies by the National Assessment of Educational Progress and by Dolores Durkin, this paper argues that students are not being taught higher level comprehension skills, such as inference, and presents hypotheses explaining this failure. The paper suggests that emphasis on skills and drills and the typical programed format advanced by…

International development education in the English classroom might consist of the critical analysis of print-media coverage of events in the Third World and the reading of fiction written by Third World authors. An integration of both activities requires a theoretical framework that would affirm the usefulness of the discipline's pursuits in…

Fundamental to any critical reading process is the ability of the child to recognize and identify assumptions concerning the world in which he or she lives and brings to the printed page. The unconscious and implicit understandings that a reader and an author hold can fill the slots of developing schemata and become embedded and subsumed in…

As individuals read, they construct meaning at various levels, including literal, interpretive, and critical. One part of this comprehension act is creative reading, which may be promoted by self-questioning so that students become personally involved in the material they read. To guide students' self-questioning strategies, teachers can both pose…

"Imbedded Aids to Readers" is a theoretical component of the "Languaging in the Content Areas" (LICA) thesis, which emphasizes that understanding the uses of language and increasing language practice will improve content reading and critical thinking ability. The imbedded aids are clusters of vocabulary and…

This issue of the "Illinois English Bulletin" is devoted to developing critical awareness, through poetry, values, the elements of fiction, and literary study. The first section considers approaching narrative through the use of popular materials and includes two essays: "Grim Tales in the English Classroom" by Larry Danielson and "From the Comics…

Maintaining that critical reading is critical thinking, this paper presents a teaching method that adapts the critical thinking/reading process to the model of reading proposed by W. S. Gray. The paper describes the four steps of the Gray model (word perception, comprehension of persuasive language, student judgment of the soundness of the…

Bloom's Taxonomy is a classification device that orders educational objectives in a hierarchical fashion, ranging from relatively simple skills of remembering to more complex skills of evaluating and judging. In the classroom, the taxonomy can be used as the basis of a series of questioning strategies designed to foster intellectual skills. In a…

To determine how college students evaluated their classmates' writing and whether their critiquing was effective, a study examined the critique sheets of 10 students, each of whom responded to two argumentative essays written by their classmates. Results suggested that student readers did not always impose the constraints necessary for providing…

Intended as a supplement to the Reading/Literature Released Exercise Set, 1979-80 Assessment, this collection exemplifies students' written responses to thirteen open-ended exercises. Each exercise, its objectives, subobjectives, administration guidelines, and national performance levels on the exercise, are documented. Detailed, age specific…

When teachers base classroom discussion of literature, particularly poetry, on the authors' manuscripts, notebooks, and letters, they allow students to watch writers write and to appreciate the craft involved in creative writing. Watching the writer at work--examining the drafts and correspondence for such poems as Blake's "London" or Keats'"To…