Many adults, even librarians who willingly add comics to their collections, often dismiss the importance of comics. Compared to reading "real" books, reading comics appears to be a simple task and compared to reading no books, reading comics might be preferable. After all, comics do have words, but the plentiful pictures seem to carry most of the…

This essay focuses on how young women students in a first-year, first-quarter basic reading and writing course wrote about their connections to the process of identity development as portrayed in the graphic novel "Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return" by Marjane Satrapi. While the circumstances of becoming a student in a required…

Recent theories of morphological processing have been dominated by the notion that morphologically complex words are decomposed into their constituents on the basis of their semantic properties. In this article we argue that the weight of evidence now suggests that the recognition of morphologically complex words begins with a rapid morphemic…

For the large population of school-age English language learners in California and the United States, the challenge of learning a second language while learning academic content is formidable. Learning to read English skillfully is key to their success. Reading instruction focused on development of oral text-reading fluency has shown strong…

For centuries, issues of civil discourse only arose concerning written and oral communication. But now, new technologies for communication and social interaction, particularly social media, have dramatically expanded the potential for human interaction. They generate significant challenges for institutional policies and practices to encourage and…

In this paper, the author looks at how she attempted to teach her students--preservice teachers--to engage in dialogic conversation about gay and lesbian identity using children's literature with gay and lesbian characters as a jumping off point. Through her analysis, the author has identified two requirements for dialogic conversation among…

This article follows the development of three literacy programs that were designed by researchers at Michigan State University to support struggling readers and writers. The literacy interventions focus on strategy instruction in both writing and reading, and they culminate in the development of an integrated reading-writing program to support the…

In reading, fixation durations are longer when the eyes fall near the center of words than when fixation occurs toward the words' ends-the inverted-optimal viewing position (I-OVP) effect. This study assessed whether the I-OVP effect was based on the fixation position in the word or the fixation position in the visual stimulus. In Experiments 1-3,…

A May 2007 Congressional advisory committee found that average full-time undergraduates spent between $700 and $1,000 on textbooks in 2003-2004 and that from 1987-2004, textbook prices at four-year public colleges rose 109 percent compared to a rise in the Consumer Price Index of 65 percent. Higher education is transitioning from atoms…

This article discusses ways in which modern online information technologies may be used to enhance students' understanding of Chinese religions and religious texts. This discussion is predicated upon a model of linguistic communication that places significant weight on the structures and "sedimented presuppositions" of language in determining the…

This study investigated the effects of reward proximity and choice of reward on the reading motivation of third-grade students as measured by indicators of task persistence. The major finding from this study was that students who were given a book as a reward and students who received no reward were more motivated to engage in subsequent reading…

Current sociocultural perspectives on language learning call on teachers to reinvent themselves in ways which facilitate student learning rather than transmit knowledge. For teachers, this means adopting new roles, and acquiring a new repertoire of teacher talk. This paper aims to further the work on facilitator talk begun by Clifton (2006) and…

Using the experiences of Andy, a working class adolescent exploring his gay identity, and the dialogical and transactional relationship he developed with Kristi, his senior-year English teacher, we argue that the teaching of reading and writing must be seen as more than the learning of discrete skills to enable future employment. On the contrary,…

This article argues that fictional writing has the potential to make a distinctive contribution to educational scholarship but brings challenges to conventional ways in which educational research is judged. It focuses on the discipline required by fictional writing and on the interplay between reader and text. It is argued that the rigour and…

Few contemporary scholars have explicitly discussed the relationship between love and rhetoric. This essay draws on the insights of Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that rhetoricians have been reluctant to theorize love for two reasons: first, it is already implied in the widely accepted concept of identification; and second, any explicit…