Through an account of how his own students analyzed Ira Sher's short story "The Man in the Well," the author calls for teachers of literature to value and attend to their classes' misreadings rather than replace them with corrective interpretations. He argues that probing these misreadings enables one to see the limits imposed by any single…

The aim of this study is to describe and analyse the writing discourse in one classroom and how students learn through studying a topic, i.e. the teaching and learning of written argument. The study takes its stance from a sociocultural perspective and is influenced by discourse analyses, new literacy studies and critical literacy (Fairclough…

In this article the author describes SQUiNK, a useful tool in interacting with text for all children and at varying levels and abilities. Initially the author sought to address the needs of readers with strong skills by more fully engaging them with expository text. But through the introduction to a strategy for addressing the needs of "all"…

Two experiments examined parafoveal preview for words located in the middle of sentences and at sentence boundaries. Parafoveal processing was shown to occur for words at sentence-initial, mid-sentence, and sentence-final positions. Both Experiments 1 and 2 showed reduced effects of preview on regressions out for sentence-initial words. In…

This article revisits the rich theoretical and empirical literatures that undergird strategy instruction, with the goal of identifying a principled approach to the teaching of strategies to enhance reading and learning with text. Its purpose is to examine the question of why strategy instruction, as enacted in practice, might raise concerns among…

This work examined how adjunct displays influence college readers' moment-by-moment processing of text and the products of reading, using reading time (Experiments 1 & 2), and think-aloud methodologies (Experiment 3). Participants did or did not study a diagram before reading a text. Overall, the reading time data, think-aloud data, and recall…

What is the hold of literature on a reader's imagination, on my imagination? I remember many hours spent with books in a kind of romantic entanglement, and heartful obsession, and joyful reverie. I certainly remember being lost with words, lost in enthusiastic abandonment. I loved the sounds of words, and the images they conjured, and the…

In a world ruled by digital communications, it can seem like there are almost as many methods, tools, and platforms to communicate with internal audiences as there are opinions and perspectives on how to do it effectively. Organizations of various sizes are struggling with how to reach their audiences' divided attention, and higher education…

The revolutionary electronic reading device, Amazon's Kindle, is already obsolete. Such is the breakneck speed of technology that the machine touted to spell the death of printed books is already heading for the scrap heap, replaced by e-readers like the iPad that access the Internet, make phone calls, download movies, and connect users with all…

Middle school students bring various identities into the classroom including their reading identities, their self concepts concerning their views of themselves as readers. Using identity and psycho-social and socio-cultural theoretical constructs as a foundation, I conducted phenomenological case studies that focused on middle school remedial…

In this "prosumer" era in which people seem always to be producing and consuming texts, words matter as much as--or more than--they ever have. Learning how grammar works in the texts they read and write is essential to students' literacy. It is time to reframe English teachers' view to include both writing "and" reading as contexts for grammar…

Visuals play an important role in the teaching and learning of science and should be embedded within and supportive of authentic science inquiry. Both researchers and teachers believe that visuals have a great deal of potential to help students understand science, but in practice, these visuals do not always live up to their promise. Teachers need…

In this column, readers are asked to reconsider several traditional instructional strategies, in particular predicting and picture walks, and the role these practices play in the elementary reading curriculum. In addition, what happens after a book has been read must be reconsidered in light of the activities in which life long readers engage. To…

This study examines the relationship between patterns of cognitive self-regulatory activities and the quality of texts produced by adolescent struggling writers (N = 51). A think-aloud study was conducted involving analyses of self-regulatory activities concerning planning, formulating, monitoring, revising, and evaluating. The study shows that…

Mark 13 predicts that certain events will occur literally within the generation of Jesus' contemporaries, and today's reader recognizes that some of these events have not taken place. The reader therefore appropriates the text as a false configuration of the world because it describes the world differently from how it is. However, the hermeneutics…