Listening to students in productive ways seems to be at the core of teaching practices aligned with the basic tenets of the constructivist world view. We present a definition for productive ways of listening, discuss the challenges involved in implementing it, and propose a way to support the "decentering" needed to learning to listen for teacher…

Performing text in the form of choral reading, rap, reader's theatre, and/or simulations offers students a powerful vehicle for understanding and recalling key concepts and significant details culled from textual materials. Creating a script, poem, or lyrics to perform requires repeated readings of a text, a practice that increases participants'…

The current study explored literacy interest or orientation of pre-school children with hearing impairment during mother-child story book interactions. Twelve pre-schoolers with varying types and levels of hearing impairment were observed during mother-child home book reading and toy play. Story books included both narrative and manipulative book…

In this article, I present three students' and one parent's reading of an excerpt from a textbook on the Israeli-Arab conflict. The excerpt is an account of a skirmish between Jews and Arabs in 1920, symbolizing for Jews the first bloody encounter between the two sides. While all students read the same excerpt, they use different mechanisms in…

The purpose of this theoretical essay is to explore the limits of traditional conceptualizations of reader and text and to propose a more general theory based on the concept of a literacy agent. The proposed theoretical perspective subsumes concepts from traditional theory and aims to account for literacy online. The agent-based literacy theory…

Offering a poetics for myth in 20th century fiction, this book argues that the nature of myth is to inspire interpretation, that every myth carries with it an intertextual body of theories regarding its meaning and yet remains capable of evoking new meaning. The book further argues that myth, when used in fiction, functions like a language, with…

Black feminist novelists continue to take issue with males who try to theorize about their artistic creations. Male attitudes toward black women's novels have been characterized as either apathetic, chauvinistic, or paternalistic. Black feminist writers should heed the call for collective racial progress and collective theoretical progress. The…

The impulse toward comedy in the poetry of Canadian author Margaret Atwood occurs as a by-product of an interaction between scripted text and performing reader. Reading, then, may be profitably viewed as a rehearsal for both. In the classroom, this stylistic approach to Atwood's poetry can be emphasized over thematic analysis. In her poetry,…

David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrovsky's book "Ways of Reading" creates a paradox for readers, for a primary thesis of the book is that there should be no standard or traditional readings to which a new reader must conform. A successful reader will interrogate and dispute the text at every turn. The book's organization mirrors the…

The reading of a literary work can give rise to five different kinds of literary knowing: (1) knowing about self; (2) knowing about others; (3) knowing about texts; (4) knowing about contexts; and (5) knowing about processes of making meaning. A literary work can prompt a reader to reflect upon aspects of his or her own life. Concentrating upon…

A study examined whether the presence of certain news values, particularly those identified by Western journalists as important, affect reader interest in a news story. Timeliness, prominence, cultural proximity, and conflict, separate and in combination, were the four news values (independent variables) under study. The dependent variable, reader…

A three-stage lesson sequence that used story grammars to teach plot development has been proved successful with a group of eight above average third grade students reading Deborah and James Howe's "Bunnicula." The first stage was a training unit designed to familiarize children with a typical story grammar's parts: a theme and plot…

Media content analysts seldom observe the principle that editorial omissions are as telling as what is published or broadcast; hence, the purpose of this paper is to explore, and thus stimulate debate about, editorial omissions or "strategic silence." It is observed that as a concept, strategic silence embraces both tact and…

Although the concept of coherence is elusive, explorations of the historical, theoretical, and empirical discussions of coherence can illuminate, though not eliminate, the concept's elusiveness. There are three inter-related and overlapping ways that readers make coherence. Intratextuality, the notion that readers perceive a text as coherent if it…

This paper is based on a transactional viewpoint (involving writer, reader, and text) in which the text is no longer external but is constructed and reconstructed by the reader during reading. Using a database developed for a previous study (Goodman and Goodman, 1978), this research examined pronoun usage in three basal texts by evaluating the…