This essay explores "content," a word and concept now often associated with writing in fields including marketing, journalism, publishing, and technical communication. I present a definition of content appropriate to writing studies and explore a range of issues and practices that the content metaphor can bring to our professional,…

This study explores how child and text clues were related to 31 kindergarteners' word-meaning derivation outcomes for 372 words presented in books read aloud to children. Data were analyzed using a multilevel, cross-classification, ordered logit model. Children showed no word-meaning derivation 40% of the time, indicating a need for instruction.…

Few empirical studies have been conducted to investigate the educational uses of graphic novels. Because of this, misconceptions and stereotypes exist. This article presents findings from a study examining the effects of graphic novels on high school students' (N = 217) reading comprehension. A graphic adaptation of a traditionally taught text…

The Bechdel test, the author's student Marley explained, is named for the US graphic novelist and cartoonist Alison Bechdel. To pass the test, a work of fiction must contain at least one scene in which two or more women (preferably named characters) discuss something other than a male. Students who read from the canon of works regularly encounter…

This study analyzes how second, third, and fourth graders in a racially integrated suburban school engaged in multimodal meaning making in the context of a book club discussing Ben Hatke's graphic novel "Zita the Spacegirl." Qualitative analysis of field notes and assessments indicated three overall findings: First, students responded to…

The authors share findings from a recent study of teens who freely select to read texts typically marginalized by schools (dystopia, vampire, romance, horror, fantasy), revealing the distinct functional and psychological benefits of pleasure reading. The students who participated in the study that the authors report on were eighth graders who…

Across one school year, in which I coached a fourth-grade teacher, she and I took an inquiry stance investigating how we could come to understand the reading identities kids held relative to Stephens' (2013) list of characteristics of effective and efficient readers. We also sought to understand how we could help kids develop, sustain, or extend…

In studies carried out in the 1980s the algebraic symbols and expressions are revealed through prealgebraic readers as non-independent texts, as texts that relate to other texts that in some cases belong to the reader's native language or to the arithmetic sign system. Such outcomes suggest that the act of reading algebraic texts submerges…

This article exposes the problem of using declarative rather than procedural knowledge to help K--12 students recognize irony in stories. It offers commonplace procedures drawn from students' everyday language experience together with more abstract irony clues to help students recognize irony in stories and increase their story comprehension.…

Mathematics methods texts are important resources for supporting preservice teachers' learning. Methods instructors routinely assign readings from texts. Yet, anecdotally and also based on reading compliance literature, many students report that they do not read assigned readings. Within this paper we briefly describe the findings from a survey of…

Participatory research can be seen as providing affordances for "listening" to student voices. This study contributes to the debate around its affordances in ameliorating democratic processes in schools. Students in a northern city secondary school in England used multimodal methods to research questions based on "where do students…

One of the key requirements of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English Language Arts is that students are able to read and access complex texts across all grade levels. The CCSS authors emphasize both the limitations and lack of accuracy in the current CCSS model of text complexity, calling for the development of new frameworks. In response…

12 teachers were interviewed and observed as they engaged students in close reading. We analyzed their responses and instruction to determine the scaffolds that were used as well as the contingency teaching plans they implemented when students were unable to understand the text.

For at least three decades, scholars have discussed the rationale for using picture books with English learners of all ages. Research on how older ESL and EFL learners can benefit from picture books, however, remains scarce. This study explored 25 Taiwanese university EFL learners' engagement in a predicting-reading-confirming-integrating plus…

Using Mariolina Salvatori's "difficulty paper" assignment to explore student experiences when reading, this paper examines basic writing students' difficulties with reading in the composition classroom. The authors argue that examining difficulty can provide an entry point for understanding how students experience the (dis)connections…