Beyond decoding words and sentences, everyone thinks of a reader as a person who makes particular kinds of intertextual connections, who asks particular kinds of questions of a text, who reads at a particular intellectual distance from the text, who talks about more than the text's meaning and analyzes its nature. The difference in how teachers…

This interpretive study proposes a framework with which to explore the ethical significance of classroom-based literacy practices. Overly narrow views of literature as a source of role models or moral precepts take insufficient account of the complexity of text and experience. Through analyses of telling examples from student writing and…

Over the past decade in the United States, levelled texts, or "little books" with finely graduated levelling of text difficulty, have regained their status as a literacy staple for beginning readers. Despite their resurgence, questions remain regarding the reliability and quality of these books. In this study, we conducted a detailed…

Recognizing the challenge of individualizing instruction, Wilhelm reminds us of some specific areas teachers must focus on: developing apprenticeship and inquiry settings in which student difference is a resource; connecting students to their reading and writing; honoring and using students' first languages; situating instruction in real or…

The reading of science-related, historical nonfiction alone does not necessarily lead students to make personal connections to science or understand science as a human endeavor interdependent with culture, society, and history. Teachers must structure students' reading to ensure that they consider specific aspects of science while reading and…

It is essential to develop future teachers' views of diversity, as contemporary teachers teach large numbers of students who are not like them linguistically or culturally. Teacher educators are responsible for preparing preservice and inservice literacy teachers to be effective in these increasingly diverse classrooms. They should continue to…

The existence of children's literature as a genre has, to a large extent, depended on its function as a force of social manipulation, rather than on any concern with literary value. The need to consider children's literature in the light of developments in literary theory that emphasize the importance of the semiotics of the text, and in…

This document describes how the main principles of Perspective Text Analysis are implemented in the PC-system PERTEX, concentrating on the main steps of the analysis. The analysis starts with normal text and ends in a topological representation of the mentality that the text presents. The text material is processed in the following main steps: (1)…

Writers construct meaning when they compose texts, and readers construct meaning when they understand and interpret texts. Building meaning through reading entails organizing, selecting, and connecting. Readers use previously acquired knowledge to operate on textual clues, organizing mental representations that include material they select from…

Two main types of schemata exist for reading: content schema, representing existing knowledge of objects and events; and textual schema, including knowledge of discourse structure and conventions. There are at least six major schema functions important to reading comprehension: (1) schemata provide slots for assimilating additional knowledge; (2)…

A study investigated whether fourth graders recall different amounts of information for passages of different emotional orientation, whether there is a relationship between their emotional response to the passage and the amount of information recalled, and whether they recall different relationships when they read passages of different emotional…

Reading is best understood as a dialectic process where the influence of reader and text are constantly merging to create a jointly produced and evolving understanding. What occurs as the reader and text come together during reading is similar in form to a dialogue, a model for the reader-text relationship that has not been explored in the reader…

Decontextualization, referring to the abstraction of a written text from all of its contexts, is a flawed concept. Rather than viewing writing as an isolated abstraction, a text's involvement with the human world should be acknowledged. Two major questions arise when dealing with the concept of decontextualization: (1) Can written discourse be…

Discusses ways to teach modern plays and poetry, using a reader response approach that makes the works more accessible to students. (HTH)

Argues that children may have difficulty in learning to read because the print in their books is designed to be looked at rather than read, or because theories about a need for uniformity and simplicity result in letter shapes that are hard to distinguish or to remember. (RS)