Language is at the heart of the learning process. We learn through language. Our knowledge about the world is constructed in language-the worlds of home and the community, the worlds of school subjects, the worlds of literature, the worlds of the workplace, and so on. It is through language that we interact with others and build our identities.…

This article respectfully challenges the metaphor of "open doors as resistance" by reconceptualizing power in the English classroom. It also offers an alternative metaphor -- open doors as acts of love and possibility -- through different theoretical and practical underpinnings. When we, according to the authors, conceive of teaching…

Decision-making is essential for the work of teaching. Preservice teachers must learn to leverage knowledge about young readers' strengths, needs, and interests in order to plan and teach guided reading lessons skillfully. However, limited research examines preservice teachers' decision-making based on what they know about individual children. In…

Graphic novels are an important literary mode with a complex history and practice, and provide struggling readers of all kinds with a visual (but equally rigorous) reading experience. English teachers must determine the criteria for quality examples of this mode to provide the highest quality texts possible to every student. This article uses…

This study examines fifth-grade Mexican American students' beliefs about emergent gender roles. We used participant-observation methodology to conduct research on six focal-student participants selected from the general fifth-grade population at an elementary school located in the Southwestern United States. Collected data included focal-student…

According to the author, as our abilities to combine image and text become more sophisticated and ubiquitous, digital storytelling is a powerful means for sharing those stories. Digital storytelling is a perfect way to remix stories. To present American literature as relevant to students' lives, the author rewrote their curriculum using backwards…

Many sixth grade students think they are telling the truth when they complain, "Reading is boring." However, they don't realize what sort of activities encompass reading. As a teacher with a few years of experience, I am finding new ways to engage reluctant readers and show them reading can take many different forms. In this essay, I…

This article begins by explaining the student centered learning paradigm. Next, the article explains various features of a student centered approach to education and how extensive reading (ER), as it is most often practiced, fits with those features. The bulk of the article suggests how ER might be implemented to make it even more learner centered.

The authors discuss how Black girls can engage with literary texts through counter fairy tales (CFT) as a resistive literary strategy to reclaim Black girls' narratives and to be reflective of their experiences. The racial violence that Black girls encounter in school cannot be separated from the remnants of the afterlife of slavery within PreK-12…

Promoting student power in the choice of high school literature can prove uncomfortable, unruly, and contentious. Without enough preparation, research, and reading, teachers may find language, content, and themes to be more mature than initially anticipated. This essay explores one teacher's reflection of two instances when choice reading…

Experts in children's literature and child development value complexity in the language, socio-emotional content, and structure of books, yet little is known regarding parents' attitudes towards these aspects. The study thus examined how parents' gender, education, and profession, children's age and gender, and frequency of parent-child reading…

The purpose of this qualitative grounded theory study was to discover the impact on adolescent reading motivation as students were given an opportunity to select recreational reading material and read consistently during class time. This study also explored the motivational impact of student engagement from dialogue with peers about their reading…

The "Kids & Family Reading Report" is a national survey sharing the views of both kids and parents on reading books for fun and the influences that impact kids' reading frequency and attitudes toward reading. "The Rise of Read-Aloud" is one installment the Scholastic "Kids & Family Reading Report™: 7th…

To resolve questions about how to discuss immigration in the classroom the author set out to find texts to help upper elementary students problematize current immigration issues. In this article, the author discusses "Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote: A Migrant's Tale" (Tonatiuh 2013), a book in which the author weaves folkloric…

In this article we discuss the differences between close reading in the primary grades and upper elementary grades. We focus on text selection, initial reading. repeated reading, annotation, text-based discussions, and responding to texts.