The point of view that teachers use in responding to students' writing affects the kinds of dramatized presences that teacher responses create. Such presences make available a range of reading and writing roles that students may adopt or reject. For a dramatic presence to be felt by a reader, a writer must select and sustain a clear means of…

This ERIC/RCS Special Collection contains seven ERIC Digests (brief syntheses of the research on a specific topic in contemporary education) and eight FAST Bibs (Focused Access to Selected Topics--annotated bibliographies with selected entries from the ERIC database), providing up-to-date information in an accessible format. The collection focuses…

This paper articulates a framework for the development and integration of three instructional strategies--discussion, reading and learning from text guides, and writing--to teach secondary school students how to produce independent and productive responses to literature. An explanation of the need for and rationale behind an integrated approach is…

The opening remarks offered by Swensen, Rozema, Young, McGrail, and Whitin (2005) make a significant contribution by creating a space for reflection and subsequent action at the intersection of English teacher preparation and technology. This brief commentary addresses several points in Swensen, et al.'s article relating to the adoption of new…

In the series introduction, Roblyer (2005) presents a conceptual framework for improving typical research on educational technology. This commentary is intended to extend and deepen Roblyer's very brief discussion of one particular type of research--studies of technology-based instructional designs--that she describes as "almost…

More than 100 decontextualized, formalistic paradigms of the narrative process are in existence, but little work has been done to apply the insights narrative theory yields to news and journalistic form. Given the journalistic assumption that facts can be presented neutrally, news professionals tend to maintain that narratives do not exist outside…

Intended for teachers, this book demonstrates the importance of teaching with real books. The first three chapters outline the components of a literature program, the settings in which it operates, and the human communities that shape it. Chapter 4 discusses literary elements: character, time, mood, layers of story meaning, place, point of view,…

Following up research by Radway and others on readers of romance novels, a study, employing a reader-response approach, was conducted with 18 female adolescent readers of romances to discover if they perceived and enjoyed the novels in ways appreciably different from other readers. The subjects filled out questionnaires about their romance novel…

In addition to her work as novelist and critic, Eudora Welty is also a valuable resource for the teaching of composition, particularly through both her theory and example, for she is always writing about writing. Many of Welty's essays on literary theory speak to problems encountered in the college writing class. Perhaps the most accessible text…

A college-level course in business literature is an ideal place to raise and discuss ethical issues. To be successful, a teacher of this course must engage student interest, help the students articulate and understand their own ethical attitudes, clarify the stance and artistry of the author, and refine student responses to ethical questions. When…

Focusing on reader response in the classroom, the works collected in this book represent the results of a five-week summer institute in which 25 middle school, high school, and college teachers studied the principles and applications of literature instruction. The following essays are included: an introduction by G. Garber; "An Overview of the…

Poetry of the romantic age is often uninviting to students, leaving them puzzled because they do not sense the connections between the poetry and themselves. Yet, much romantic poetry can be enjoyed and comprehended if approached in terms of some personal, reflective, and connective readings. Wordsworth and Whitman are often avoided because they…

The Flesch readability index yields meaningful information about the responses of readers to texts. Because the formula is so simple, a group of English teachers wrote a program in BASIC that would count some obvious surface features of a text and calculate Flesch scores. Among the programing problems encountered were counting words (taking into…

The spontaneous use of imaging and its relationships to verbal recall and literary analysis were investigated in a study in which 72 college students read a literary text under one of three sets of instructions that manipulated processing depth in an externally valid fashion. Imagery reports and free verbal recalls of the story were collected…

A study investigated the effects on students' cognitive development of a freshman composition course in which reading, writing, and discussion were integrated in an attempt to increase students' awareness of ambiguities, uncertainties, and complexities. The design of the one-semester course was derived from William Perry's theory of…