Shares how one teacher used a small group setting to promote cross-cultural experiences while reading the novel "The Old Man and the Sea." (MG)

Describes student-led discussions as an effective approach that accommodates diverse student populations and a wider variety of texts. Offers the views of two quite different students about its effectiveness, and explores how such discussions naturally give rise to a variety of voices as students cite text and quote one another. (SR)

The reader's knowledge about how a message is woven into discourse plays an important role in reading comprehension. This article first reviews reasons for student difficulties in comprehension, sentence groups, and sense units and then presents a basic discourse framework and its applications for analyzing text passages. (Contains two…

Provides a rationale for learning-with-text experiences for primary-grade children; lists 10 general approaches to foster primary-grade content area reading; and offers a sample lesson incorporating these approaches that promotes comprehension of text and content matter. Suggests that trade books, textbooks, realistic fiction, and other print…

Discusses a study of the moral meanings first through third graders found as they participated in literature-study groups at Valley View Elementary School (Connecticut). Defines morality and four types of "moral talk" observed in the classroom, and asserts that literature analysis offers a powerful tool for fostering moral development. Contains 14…

Describes an in-class exercise in which students listen to a piece of music (without lyrics), and then write about their responses. Notes that students learn that responding to literature is as natural as responding to music, and that they all have valid and unique reactions and connections to literature. (SR)

Finds that first graders who received direct instruction in awareness of four pragmatic language functions (heuristic, imaginative, regulatory, and personal) evidenced greater recognition and awareness of these functions in narrative than did uninstructed children. Implies that it is useful to cultivate such pragmatic awareness to promote…

Indicates that college student subjects infer public opinion by relying on their own subjective assessments of media content coupled with their own presumptions about effects of such content on others. Supports this persuasive press inference, even when content included base-rate information contrary to "story slant." Indicates projection of…

Explores how undergraduate readers take the protagonist's mental perspective in stories involving conflicting beliefs about a situation. Demonstrates that readers with privileged information build emotional inference corresponding to the protagonist's (wrong) beliefs; inferences related to protagonist's beliefs are backward inferences at the text…

Examines Gary Crew's novel written for a young adult audience, called "Strange Objects," a story containing verifiable historical fact interwoven with elements of fiction and the supernatural. Shows how the numerous genres and viewpoints in the book challenge and contradict one another, forcing young readers to perform resistant readings…

Extracts from four case studies of student readers describe how students approached the reading of the same text, the students' general approach to academic reading, and their feelings about reading and being a student. Suggests that the normally neutral or pleasurable private activity of reading is disturbed in the academic context by the threat…

Describes how and why the author and his colleagues used reading conferences to assist upper-grade elementary students who struggle with reading. Describes teaching readers to choose books wisely; coaching them in thinking about the text while figuring out print; the usefulness of interruptions and word-building; working with writing; and keeping…

Investigates student motivation for reading a college student newspaper, including evaluations of performance and content preferences. Finds general support for expectations derived from utility theory; that localism (i.e. campus news) remains one of the strongest niches for an urban college paper; and that heavier readers perceived higher utility…

Investigates how readers use predication for the interpretation of referents in text and to develop a coherent model of the events described in text. Illustrates how two types of predication (scalar copredication and antipredication) induce readers to disambiguate the referents of definite noun phrases in essentially the opposite way, with…

Describes a framework that helps seventh- and eight-grade readers write about what they notice, question, feel, and relate to (about the book they are reading) in reader response journals. Shows how, as a result, they deepen their involvement with and understanding and enjoyment of literature. (SR)