In 1988, the author taught remedial Senior English reading at a rural high school. None of the students intended to go to college. Instead, they all planned to be homemakers, farmers, or watermen. On the second day of class, he assigned a short story from the cumbersome literature book. The classroom was quiet for a moment, and then one of the…

The paper examines the situation of translation in the contemporary world, particularly with respect to the changes in the political economy of developed and developing societies. It is argued that the nature of the changes impinge directly on translation and translation finds itself at the heart of the new informational economy, which in turn has…

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 paper describes the impact of an oral retelling of Homer's "Iliad" on pupils' learning in Key Stage 2 classrooms (children aged 9-11) in schools in East London. We argue that the oral nature of the retelling and responses promoted high levels of engagement and inclusion, leading to enhanced understanding by the pupils. The use of a…

This study examined the influence of critical reading orientation on use of external strategies such as note-taking and underlining while reading an expository text. In two experiments, undergraduate students were asked either to review an article on a linguistic policy (critical reading) or to summarise it (less-critical reading). Experiment 1…

The author used a discourse analytic framework to examine the "voice" of a middle school mathematics unit. The aim of the analysis was to see whether the authors of the unit achieved the ideological goal (i.e., the intended curriculum) put forth by the NCTM's "Standards" (1991) to shift the locus of authority away from the teacher and the textbook…

The art of reading refers to the act of representing and interpreting text through oral dramatic reading. To the dismay of many teachers, reading is becoming a "lost art." Students are expected to apply specific literacy techniques rather than use their imagination to learn to enact text. Based on a study of the reading perceptions of natural oral…

In this article, we report on grade-one children's preferences for narrative and/or information books, and their perceptions of what boys and girls like to read. Data include responses on two book preference tasks by 40 children in four schools. Children chose books and explained the reasons for their choices. One task was a closed, force-choice…

Research suggests that children's understanding of text can be improved by the explicit teaching of those comprehension strategies that are used implicitly by skilled readers, particularly the use of self-regulating strategies to generate questions about text. This study of the teaching of comprehension in 51 London Key Stage 2 classrooms explores…

This paper reports the results of a controlled field experiment in which voice communication was introduced into an existing online community (online gaming guilds within the popular game "World of Warcraft"), comparing a mix of voice and text with text only. Quantitative results suggest increases in liking and trust due to the addition of voice,…

This article considers ideological, pedagogical and constitutive functions of children's picture books, with particular emphasis on the ways in which texts construct children and childhood in economic terms. Through an analysis of Lauren Childs' "Hubert Horatio Bartle Bobton-Trent" and Anthony Browne's "Voices in the Park", the article…

Many students enter high school unskilled in the art of reading to learn from science textbooks. Even students who can read full-length novels often find science books difficult to read because students have relatively little practice with the various types of expository text structures used by such textbooks (Armbruster, 1991). Expository text…

To understand difficulties in early literacy most research has focused on print related knowledge. Knowing about print, however, is only one aspect of reading and may neglect how successful early readers also develop capacities to enter the text world and make sense of it through a personal, relational experience. To explore this other aspect of…

A dream literature class grew into an artistic and critical garden in which students' and instructor's thinking flowered.

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…