This paper briefly reviews the state of the art in reader response research with special reference to the Danish studies in reader responses. The paper then proceeds to a discussion of a number of methodological problems inherent in setting up questions for cross-cultural (and international) studies in general, and for reader response studies in…

An exploratory study used stimulated recall to elicit a retrospective account from two alternative school students who choreographed a dance to depict their understanding of the relationship between the two central characters in a short story. Their account indicates that in composing their text they: (1) initiated their interpretation by…

A companion to "The Reading Environment," this book is concerned with getting groups of children to talk openly and confidently about their readings of particular books. Using a generous selection of transcripts of classroom discussions, the book shows how children can be encouraged to share their enthusiasms and difficulties and the…

A study underscored the potential of whole language philosophy as a framework for secondary English teachers and students as they move away from strictly traditional methods. Research methods included case study, grounded theory, and qualitative inquiry. Participants included 2 veteran teachers who taught in a predominantly white, suburban high…

This paper reconsiders the nature of literature as a school subject. Musing on three anomalies that occur when language arts teachers consider their professions about school literature and what occurs in literature classrooms: (1) the anomaly of the text and the textbook; (2) the anomaly of the idolatry of naive readers whose heads have been…

Originally developed for the Department of Defense Schools (DoDDS) system, this learning package on writing as a response to reading is designed for teachers who wish to upgrade or expand their teaching skills on their own. The package includes a comprehensive search of the ERIC database; a lecture giving an overview on the topic; the full text of…

In a study of writing perceptions held by college faculty in disciplines other than English, 81 faculty members indicated whether each of 67 student writing errors bothered them a great deal, a little, or not at all. Results showed that teachers did not strongly object to errors apparently produced by carelessness or by ignorance of finer…

One approach to teaching organization to a writing class is to subdivide the organizational processes. One subdivision recognizes that certain compositions have a predictable format--they put expected parts in predictable places. Following a format at appropriate times is a skill that should be taught, or at least insisted upon, at the beginning…

This response to"Beliefs about Technology and the Preparation of English Teachers: Beginning the Conversation" (Swenson, Rozema, Young, McGrail, & Whitin, 2005) offers a framework for considering the qualities of the technology-using English teacher.

Many current models of television viewing regard viewers either as passive receptors, active participants, or addled dupes. A study proposed a more flexible model for television viewing research. The study used the television program "St. Elsewhere," an example of "meta-television" (television programming which contains hidden…

A study explored the effects of both prior knowledge of acronyms and their form of presentation (cued or uncued) on reader recognition of acronym meaning. Among the hypotheses tested were that (1) a reader presented with an acronym ranked as familiar is more likely to recognize that acronym than one ranked unfamiliar, and (2) that a reader…

The diversity of textbook and scholarly book reviewers makes it difficult for an author to deal with reviews in any systematic or preplanned manner. There are, however, several helpful working assumptions: (1) the reviewer is always right, (2) the author is always right in principle but frequently wrong in practice, (3) the publisher wants what…

To discover the components of a trustworthy source, a study evaluated the credibility of health-related news stories. Subjects, 192 college undergraduates, read one of four random versions of a one-page newspaper story about aspirin's ability to ward off heart attacks. They were told that the sources for the articles were: a medical journal (high…

On the basis of a National Humanities project proposed by the English department of a St. Louis, Missouri high school, many different approaches to drawing students into writing about and understanding literature were developed. One of three such techniques is a sequence of writing-reading-writing that offers the possibility of both enhancing the…

Literary gaps were identified by Wolfgang Iser in 1974 as "vacant pages" that invite the reader to reflect and enter into the text thereby motivating students to experience the text as reality. Arthur Applebee, in 1979, identified three categories to distinguish children's types of interaction with stories: (1) the complexity of literary…