Describes the effects (both positive and negative) personal knowledge about students has on student writing conferences. (MM)

Focuses on the role of pictures in books used for reading instruction to determine how they are used, how their content has changed over the years, and how pictures affect reading comprehension. (FL)

Recounts the effective use of unusual teaching methods for poetry: (1) allowing students to read and write about Wordsworth outside on a warm spring day, and (2) asking students to keep a journal while reading the poetry of Hughes. Suggests that these approaches allow students to "bring their own experiences" to the poetry text. (NH)

Addresses the pros and cons of biographies in general and reviews both good and mediocre biographies of women written for an adolescent audience. (SRT)

Argues that literacy has indirect cognitive effects through the conceptual distinctions and social practices that it fosters. Examines the distinction between what is given in a text and what is inferred by readers. Argues that children's acquisition of this distinction is decisive in the development of a literary thought mode. (JD)

Clarifies some common misconceptions about the nature of narcissism and projection and employs recent developments in post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory to explain how projective activities are filtered and altered by a certain notion of textual objectivity: objectivity as defined by the text's material signifiers. (FL)

Compares the theories of writing style advocated by Barthes and Coles. (FL)

Finds that although pictures do not seem to increase comprehension of the material, students prefer texts with them. Concludes that pictures provide no cognitive benefit but do have an affective impact on students, the nature of which was not determined by the research. (SRT)

Suggests that a poetic writing of traits, inviting readers to seek meaning in a poem's visual form, rests on a myth of the portrait in which marks of a written language are drawn directly from nature. (DF)

This is an attempt to clarify principally some fundamental ideas clustered around the concept of the formal conditions which would constitute a fruitful studying of philosophy. First, an ideal study situation would require the student to participate in the object-subject dialogue; philosophical studies are an active dialogue between the text and…

This paper discusses an Owen Wister poem published in 1920 in "The Atlantic Monthly" and brought to the attention of a university class without any information as to its context or its references, and read in various ways by various individuals, as information about the poem's context was gradually discovered. The central issue explored…

Because playwrights are limited to textual elements that an audience can hear and see--dialogue and movement--much of a drama's tension and interest lie in the subtext, the characters' emotions and motives implied but not directly expressed by the text itself. The teacher must help students construct what in a novel the author may have made more…

Exploring ways of helping teachers to extend their pupils' literacy, this paper's intent is to devise and try in classrooms a range of strategies whereby teachers might develop the abilities of their children to use literacy more effectively as a means of learning. It gives an outline of the model used, the Extending Interaction with Texts, or…

Describes using a three-step process (called active reflection) with secondary school remedial reading students. Notes that, using this framework, students use literature to make connections, release their imaginations through reaction to literature, and record their reflections in a variety of ways. (SR)

Investigates readers' ability to identify main ideas in narrative texts and the development of this ability. Results reveal that even the youngest students were able to identify the main ideas, but they did so less consistently than did older students. Findings have implications for theories of text comprehension development and for educational…