This paper explores the relationship between New Critical close reading techniques and studies of literary engagement by building on the work of Sumara, Rosenblatt and Todorov. New Critical techniques responded to the allusive density and terseness of modernist poetry and fiction. In the half-century since, the situated approaches favoured by…

Although it depicts a Germanic warrior culture of nearly 1,500 years ago, the Old English epic poem "Beowulf" contains timely insights into leadership and motivation, trust, respect, loyalty, and sacrifice that could inform current leadership practice and teaching. To help reveal some of these insights, this study has three main…

In "Language, the Learner and the School", Douglas Barnes recognised that intonation was important to classroom interaction but also acknowledged that his own research team did not choose to analyse it. This article presents instances of classroom talk about poetry and reflects on them using Barnes' concepts of pupil participation, exploratory…

Literature students often fear poetry explication, supposing it is beyond their intellectual reach. As with many preconceptions that surface in the classroom, this is an impression I find helpful to tackle forthrightly. Years of teaching literature have convinced me that even English majors can become timid in the face of assignments calling for…

To truly comprehend and appreciate texts, we need to read more slowly. Schools should provide a counterbalance to our increasingly hectic digital environment, where so many of us read and write in abbreviated messages and through clicks of the mouse. To help students reclaim the acoustical properties of written language and appreciate the passages…

With the United States obesity rate at 34% in adults and 17% in children, and increased inactivity among young people, the authors decided to create an interdisciplinary (art and health) lesson that they hoped would raise student awareness on the subject. In this article, the authors describe how their middle-school students created an artwork of…

As a man of mystery, little is known about Titus Lucretius except that he was a 1st-century B.C.E. philosopher-poet who wrote an epic poem called "Of the Nature of Things" to explain the universe and people's place within it in strictly material terms. In the poem, Lucretius intertwines myths with scientific hypotheses to propose an Epicurean view…

UIL has published a second edition of a collection of case studies of promising literacy programmes that seek to empower women. "Narrowing the Gender Gap: Empowering Women through Literacy Programmes" (originally published in 2013 as "Literacy Programmes with a Focus on Women to Reduce Gender Disparities") responds to the…

Interpreting the occurrence of sexual violation in seventeenth-century Spanish literary works necessitates for modem scholars the difficult task of understanding prevailing contemporary attitudes toward rape. Studies by Higgins and Silver, Casas, and Welles discuss how literary texts with rape scenes as narrative material often use the act or its…

After more than three decades of telling students that, unlike fiction, poetry is detached from the world of commerce, floating in a zone where certain pressures, including money, do not obtain, the author has begun to rethink his stance. Although poetry yields no cash in a literal sense, poets talk metaphorically about "banking" poems, allowing…

This study has been conducted to investigate the effectiveness of using poetry to teach vocabulary in a foreign language classroom. It aims to find answers to two research questions (1) "Do the learners enhance more extensive vocabulary knowledge by means of poetry-based vocabulary teaching activities than the traditional coursebook…

This dissertation examines the way in which sonnets improved reading comprehension through a case study. The study was conceptually framed around the ideas of the New Critics, who employed two particular fallacies to ensure the most accurate reading of literature. The purpose of the study was to see the potential benefits that could come from…

This article describes an instructional lesson the author developed to help students use parody to read and write original poetry. The author begins this article with an introduction to parody and a rationale for using it as an instructional strategy. Then, he describes materials and procedures he used and he shares samples of student writing. He…

In this work ubiquitous learning technologies are applied to Chinese scenic poetry appreciation. A folksonomy-based approach is proposed to accumulate knowledge about poems and their corresponding scenic spots. A user can use a "Tagging" operation by a smart phone to associate a concept (a word, a phrase or a sentence) with a scenic…

This theory-to-practice article focuses on interdisciplinary classroom activities based on principles of minimalism in modern music, art, and poetry. A lesson sequence was designed for an inner-city Grades 4 and 5 general classroom of English language learners, where the unit was taught, assessed, and documented by the authors. Included in the…