To determine the influence of the health care provider's gender and profession on readers' memory for health information, 48 university students were asked to read a three page article on heart attacks that was attributed to either (1) a female nurse, (2) a male nurse, (3) a female physician, or (4) a male physician. After reading the article, the…

The current literary tradition observes a canon of hierarchies, a ranking of great writers and genres, that tends to exclude or downgrade women and lower caste males. The response of feminist scholars to this state of affairs falls into two general categories: the first is to find great women authors to fit into the canon on its own terms; the…

To examine the effect of structural factors on the development of story appreciation, a developmental model of story liking for suspense stories was tested by having second, fourth, and sixth grade children rate suspense stories on 10 affective scales. Specifically, the model predicted that (1) reader identification would increase with greater…

The authors of this essay regularly require students to engage in informal writing as a means to promote learning. One form of informal writing is the summary/reaction journal. In summary/reaction journals, students read a chapter or article, write a summary of that reading, and then react by offering their own insights and responses to the…

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…

Reader-response journals were successfully employed in a "Reading Shakespeare" course for non-majors, making literary tradition accessible to students untrained in classical rhetoric. Students were encouraged to employ any combination of four approaches. First, students were invited to ask questions about the language, sequence of…

Offering activities for secondary school students and amateur creative writers, this book demonstrates how teachers can break out of "high culture" stereotypes that make students think poetry has no connection with real life. Part one discusses the essentials of poetry and the roles of poets from ancient oral cultures to the present. The…

Elements from literary, composition, and reader-response theory can be successfully combined in teaching an African-American literature class to college students of the dominant culture. Helping students to decode texts is of primary importance, best done by introducing students to the cultural codes used by minority writers to shape their themes.…

A study reanalyzed data from two previous studies to investigate (1) validity of imagery ratings and reports as measures of reader response to a story, and (2) similarity of final regression models for recall and imagery reports. Imagery and affect ratings of story paragraphs were found to predict both imagery reports and recall of a second,…

A study was conducted to write an ethnographic description of how the influences of the reader's culture and the culture depicted in a text are associated with the responses of first-semester college freshmen to a series of contemporary Appalachian short stories. Cultural backgrounds of six informants and the cultures depicted in six stories were…

Based on the Protocol Aided Revision (PAR) system, this series of instructional units employs user protocols to provide the writer with feedback about a reader's response to a text and to help the writer become more sensitive to textual problems that may interfere with a reader's understanding. Geared to professionals who write on the job, the…

One of the most effective means of achieving a successful program in reading is the use of the young adult novel to stimulate the adolescent's interest in free reading or even to instill an interest where there is none. A novel which provides pleasurable reading experiences with interesting material at the proper level (such as novels by Judy…

A study investigated the effects of writing in a personal and a formal mode on students' understanding of literary text. Formal text-based and personal reader-based writing samples produced by 65 tenth grade students in response to two stories from D. Sohn's "Ten Modern American Short Stories" were analyzed for quality of response,…

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…

A study investigated whether the reading preferences of emotionally disturbed boys were the same as the interests of boys in the general population. Subjects, 25 boys from a private residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed boys, were interviewed individually, completed a reading interest survey, and selected titles of books they…