Children quickly become bored with repetition requiring the library media specialists to vary their booktalk formats to sustain children's attention and promote recreational reading. This article discusses the four basic booktalk formats: plot summary, anecdote, character description, creation of mood, and a fifth to promote books with a common…

Describes an approach to mainstreaming Native American works into an American literature survey college course using the "Norton Anthology of American Literature." Goals are to situate Native American texts within the canon, accentuate their aesthetic qualities, address the fundamental questions they raise about literature and American…

Integrates the results of a formalist discourse analysis of Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" with field observations of his programs in Latin America. Identifies some features of Freire's discursive construction of knowledge. Documents the practice of Freire's rehumanizing discourse within consciousness-raising programs in both…

Discusses the genre of teen paperback series. Topics addressed include the necessity for different evaluation criteria than those applied to monographs regarding setting, characters, and continuity; value judgments regarding quality and enjoyment; collection development; and improved circulation. (LRW)

Maintains that the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines make it possible to encode dramatic works as either an event or a text, but do not permit scholars to do both. Discusses approaches to encoding speeches and other aspects of dramatic texts. (CFR)

Great women artists may go unrecognized because the institutional frameworks and cultural histories by which they are judged are missing. Harriet Beecher Stowe, often disparaged as a trivial writer, is a case in point. Her work, identified as parlor literature, is pivotal in the development of a national literature. (SLD)

Describes a second-grade teacher-researcher's efforts to foster her Latino/a students' growth in writing. Focuses on her strategies (sometimes successful, sometimes not) to make the tacit aspects of writing explicit to her bilingual students via classroom talk. Searches for the right measure of explanation in two areas: fostering revision and…

Teacher educator and researcher Peterson works with eighth-grade science teacher, Rochwerger, who believes that writing is a learning tool that will enable her students to become scientifically literate. Here, we see this belief played out through an action research project that found students using a genre of their choice to write about what they…

I have presented the findings from a longitudinal case study of one child's writing from kindergarten to grade 3, across different curriculum contexts, with a focus on writing in mathematics, social studies, science, and music. I describe changes in textual features of the child's writing over time, which support Newkirk's (1987) developmental…

The art of writing a successful conference proposal is an important task for many TESOL professionals. If the proposal is not accepted, they will not be able to present their paper, and thus may not be able to get funds to attend the conference. Despite its importance, there is little research regarding this genre. In the present study we describe…

In this article, the author describes how she came to develop a unit that embraces the genre of mystery and suspense writing and allows students to explore the world of ghouls through four major projects in the areas of reading, writing, art, and research. The unit was introduced in the first two weeks of school to allow students some time to work…

This study aims at understanding how the use of different reading activities affects readers' comprehension of short stories. Forty-seven students with an advanced level of English proficiency participated in the study where a quasi-experimental research design was pursued. The experimental and control groups of students completed different sets…

This book, intended for teachers of grades 4-8, is organized into 9 units with distinct genres or subgenres of literature. Each of the units begins with an overview for the teacher summarizing the essential characteristics of the genre, followed by pre-reading activities to help students recall and organize their previous reading, followed by a…

Pointing out that influential movements in psychology, reading instruction, and curriculum development have greatly altered the terrain formerly occupied by the "teaching of literature," this literature review outlines the different ways education researchers have examined the following questions about literature instruction: (1) What…

A study of two contemporary American novels, told in first-person narration, explored the distribution and function of relative clauses in literary narrative. For comparative purposes, data from oral conversation, 2 written expository works, 6 other novels, and 20 short oral narratives were also considered. Three types of relative clause are…