This book addresses a wide range of reading needs by providing exercises that focus on comprehension and word strategies. It also provides an instructional process for meeting those needs. The instructional process is individualized, and is designed to: (1) assess initial reading competence; (2) direct learners to the chapters specifically related…

As a radical supplement to multiculturalism a liberatory pedagogy is needed that explicitly challenges social conditions and ideologies that reproduce inequality. In training new teaching assistants of composition, a teacher used Jane Tompkins'"Pedagogy of the Distressed" to try an experiment in critical pedagogy. In her text, Tompkins…

A qualitative study examined the ways in which middle school and high school students create meanings when they are reading literary and non-literary texts. Subjects, 18 seventh-grade and 18 eleventh-grade students attending schools in an inner city or a suburban school district and judged by their teachers to be either above, at, or below average…

Students can be taught to interpret and write about literature by emphasizing the thinking skills or strategies involved. A series of activities emphasizes thinking skills since this is where textbook teaching methodologies sometimes get off track. The first activity is designed to find out where students are having difficulty in reading and…

Thirty-nine at-risk college freshmen participated in an eight week non-credit seminar in the Fall of 1989. At the beginning of the seminar, students indicated that they enjoyed reading, did leisure reading, and felt that lack of vocabulary, slow reading rate, and inability to concentrate were their major reading problems. They also described their…

An immersed reading of Ralph Ellison's novel "Invisible Man" reveals a living language informed inevitably by extrinsic circumstance. As an imperfect product of Ellison's own Enlightenment kind of thought--his idea that concepts and texts divorce themselves from social agendas--such a reading reveals a truth of another sort quite…

There appears to be a problem in the way students in introductory, nonmajor literature courses read poetry that affects the way they write about it. One widely accepted belief among students is that there is a hidden but identifiable meaning in the poem that they are supposed to discover. The problem with this strategy is that most students lack…

The developmental approach to high school literature study in this guide involves an instructional model emphasizing fluency (a period of responsiveness and support by the teacher), control (that part of instruction traditionally recognized as a high school literature), and precision (that phase of instruction in which rigor and intensity in…

Critical reading and thinking abilities can be encouraged among average and above-average secondary school students through the study of literature. One approach is to give students a study sheet on the elements of the short story. The students should be led through the elements listed and given an opportunity to express their opinions about the…

One of the most effective vehicles for testing students is new material, but it is frequently difficult to find selections by authors with whom students have no familiarity or about whom an abundance of critical material does not exist. The works of Lawrence Ferlinghetti provide an excellent source not only for testing knowledge, but also for…

Articles in this monograph reflect the fact that English teachers see reading and literature as closely related. The opening essay, "Reading Is Non-Linear," provides the theoretical base for a comprehensive approach, drawing on current psycholinguistic theory. "Toward Comprehensive Reading Programs in Secondary Schools," reviews current issues and…

One way to minimize the test taking advantage that test-wise students have is to offer all students the opportunity to become test-wise through formal instruction in test taking. This paper describes the development and use of "Form Z," a test that can be used as a teaching aid or as a research instrument for test wiseness. The test was designed…

The production of a book review journal by students is suggested as a way of encouraging reading and of developing clear, expository writing. Guidelines are provided for the sequential development of such a journal. Criteria are offered for evaluating fiction and nonfiction books, with examples of annotations featuring style, period or setting of…

Focusing on how teachers can devise instructional routines to help students learn to learn, this paper discusses mechanisms for training students to devise their own strategies for learning. Because of the dominance of deliberate memory strategies in training research, the paper begins with a brief consideration of such literature, then proceeds…

Writing can be taught most effectively when teachers build the disorienting characteristics of reading literature into the inventive stages (prewriting and revision) of writing literary interpretations. The reading of literature and the process of composing interpretive essays are both different and similar. They are similar because they are both…