This article examines how drama education strategies enrich children's understanding and excitement of a story before they read, preparing them for a deeper exploration and appreciation of the story. Following a book's basic storyline, drama strategies guide children through an honest, spontaneous enactment of a story's key events without…

Advances in technology have caused a major shift in how students spend their time and challenged curriculum development to maintain interest and focus in the classroom. Implications are most profound in issues related to literacy due to a lack of experience and interest in reading. This article explores this issue and how it relates to teaching…

Seventy-six children ages 3 to 5 were individually read two storybooks that had been specially formatted to contain salient printed words within the text, and illustrations and text on left or right-facing pages. The reader pointed to each word while reading to half of the children. After each book, children were asked to recognize elements of the…

This article analyzes the construction of Whiteness in children's literature that intentionally brings Whiteness to the surface. We wondered: do the authors re-center Whiteness in their attempts to racialize White people? What literary strategies and linguistic techniques do the authors call on to present Whiteness and, subsequently, Blackness?…

Freire told his audience at a seminar at the University of Massachusetts, "You need to read knee-deep in texts, for deeper than surface meanings, and you need to know the words to be able to do it" (quoted in Cleary, 2003). In a children's literature class, fifteen teachers and I traveled along a path that moved us toward reading…

This article addresses how Christians can read wisely and well as citizens of both God's kingdom and an increasingly secular society. I suggest that focussing on reading as a transaction between reader and text rather than on the morality of texts or the maturity of readers can provide a biblical approach for Christian educators seeking to invest…

James Welch's "Winter in the Blood" (1974) and "The Death of Jim Loney" (1979) are excellent examples of work that remains essentially misunderstood throughout some three decades of interpretation. Attempts to define these two books in terms of mainstream modernism notwithstanding, they represent a phenomenon not unlike aspects of American folk…

Findings from this study of how two pairs of eighth-grade students each transacted with a website during think-aloud sessions at the conclusion of a curricular unit on Mexico and migration highlight the ways the students engaged in three interrelated tasks: (1) Identifying and making sense of "new" information; (2) Evaluating claims and evidence;…

This study extended the work of S. Siddiqui, R. F. West, and K. E. Stanovich (1998), who studied the link between general print exposure and syllogistic reasoning. It was hypothesized that exposure to certain text structures that contain well-delineated logical forms, such as popularized scientific texts, would be a better predictor of deductive…

Characters in children's books can help to guide readers through stories, contributing to deepened understandings of plot and themes. The authors discuss why characters become vivid and lasting in readers' minds, the ways in which students are often asked to think about characters in classroom literature study, and how students' understanding of…

Assuming that readers' emotional responses can enhance readers' metacognitive experiences and inform literary analysis, this study of 11th-grade poetry readers features instruction that models both cognitive and affective reading processes. The author: (1) Presents a case for more explicit attention to emotion in language arts classrooms; (2)…

Written in the tradition of Studs Terkel, this book presents oral histories of 77 diverse readers (from avid to infrequent readers) about how reading affects their lives. Sprinkled throughout the book are narratives of nationally recognized personalities, such as Maxine Hong-Kingston, Robert MacNeil, Gloria Steinem, Linus Pauling, Julie Harris,…

This study used television segments to investigate the impact of multimedia in establishing context for text learning. Adult participants (n=128) were shown a video either before or after reading a story. The video shown before reading was intended to create a "set" for either a burglar or buyer perspective contained in the story. The…

The process of figuring things out probably is more intriguing than anything else. Metaphor and memory contribute to the figuring out which is done in two personal essays: "Think about It" by Frank Conroy and "The Hidden Teacher" by Loren Eiseley. Metaphor and memory close distances between text and reader, and evoke conditions…

The advent of postmodern criticism has brought about numerous changes in the way those in the academy read and teach the reading of texts. From Michel Foucault's "What is an Author?" to Roland Barthes'"The Death of the Author" and beyond, critics and theorists have sought to decrease the author-ity of the material that is read.…