Explains how a teacher comes to learn that primary and intermediate grade students are engaged by fiction and nonfiction both, that they do not associate one with pleasure and the other with learning. Argues that readers of all ages find meaning in a work, fictional or nonfictional, to the extent that it relates to their own lives and experiences.…

Reports results of an observational study of museum exhibit design. Suggests eight communication practices from successful museum exhibit design that could be transferred to information design for the Web. (SR)

Discusses how connecting students to reading requires more than just an energetic approach. Presents a framework for reading experiences: engagement, exploration, collaboration, and individual celebration. Describes a program that gives students varied opportunities to become engaged in literature, choice in what they read, time to actually read,…

Discusses the popularity in Britain and America in the 1920s of texts written by little girls. Suggests the child writer offers a private experience that seems to speak only to the reader but in reality speaks to everyone. Claims the child writer is at once perfectly ordinary and utterly extraordinary. (NH)

Explores questions of paratext and spin-off text through an investigation of web sites and other forms of satellite texts relating to three series of novels for young people: the Harry Potter novels by J.K. Rowling, "His Dark Materials" by Philip Pullman, and the Disc-world novels of Terry Pratchett. (SG)

Discusses how four picture books, "Granpa,""The Tunnel,""The Wolf," and "Shortcut," provide the stimulus for children to become more effective readers through the use of sophisticated literary strategies. Explores some of the "gap-filling" required of readers as they deal with the indeterminacies…

Discusses reading comprehension difficulty among older students. Only 40% of adolescents can read well enough to comfortably manage standard high school texts--untangling specialized text to construct meaning does not come automatically. Offers tips for reinforcing reading strategies that center on teaching children to interact with text. These…

Our social worlds are visually saturated. A feature of post-modern society is its relentless traffic in images, often borrowed from diverse times and places, and patched together in ever changing ways. This traffic serves commercial purposes, shapes identities, and increasingly stands in for reality itself. As a newspaper columnist noted, "most of…

Not convinced that teachers and teacher-librarians were actively suppressing their students' visual literacy, the author decided to conduct informal interviews with four local teacher-librarians (three elementary and one secondary) attending classes at the university where he instructs. All four indicated that though their libraries were rich…

The secondary school teachers can make a difference even if they do not have formal training in teaching reading in the content areas. Teachers can support improved reading comprehension by introducing model approaches that encourage interaction with text, which helps students gain insight into their own reading strategies and also increase their…

As a lover of language and literature, as a serious yet secular Jew, and as a long-time educator in Jewish schools who strives to implement the best practices possible, the author found herself in an educational trap. Typically, even in liberal Jewish practice, Written Law, i.e. the Torah, and Oral Law, i.e. the rabbinic commentaries, are tightly…

Three experiments investigated how readers manage their mental representations during narrative comprehension. The first experiment investigated whether readers' access to their mental representations of the main character in a narrative becomes enhanced (producing a "benefit") when the character is rementioned; the first experiment also…

This article explores the potential and limitations of Louise Rosenblatt's account of aesthetic reading as a basis for understanding the relationship between literary experience and spiritual development. It does so by examining a particular act of reading involving a poem by Ernst Jandl in the light of Rosenblatt's account of "aesthetic reading"…

Since its publication in 2000, Strategies That Work has become an indispensable resource for teachers who want to explicitly teach thinking strategies so that students become engaged, thoughtful, independent readers. In this revised and expanded edition, the authors have added twenty completely new comprehension lessons, extending the scope of the…

Because of difficult academic vocabulary and ambiguous explanations of many concepts, science texts are hard for students to read and understand. To become skilled readers of content material, students need to learn the meanings of the academic science vocabulary. They must also be able to understand the concepts presented in the textbook.…