Describes a cooperative effort by a school librarian and a middle school English teacher to bring young adult literature into the classroom through the creation of booklists and giving booktalks for books on the list. Discusses benefits to the library and the classroom. Presents an annotated bibliography of titles according to the time period in…

Describes the author's own rough start learning about hypertext, and how she began to introduce her middle school students to hypertext. Observes processes students used working on the hypertext "Slave Narrative Project," a joint project between social studies and English departments in the author's middle school and an American teacher in Ghana.…

Discusses the use of novels and other works written by African American women as tools for teaching the history of black women in the United States in an undergraduate course. Focuses on specific works used in the course, such as Octavia Butler's "Kindred" and Terry McMillan's "Waiting to Exhale." (CMK)

Readers of most literary works usually find themselves in the role of witness, where their very act of reading initiates a process in which students or apprentices and teachers or educators take part in a "narrative" of imparting knowledge. An intertextual reading of literary works on the one hand and of current educational texts (e.g., programs,…

Units of study that contain fictional and informational texts can improve students' comprehension by strengthening background knowledge, vocabulary, and motivation. Such units improve students' background knowledge when informational texts activate or build prior knowledge for fictional texts on the same topic, vocabulary when they provide…

This article examines the responses of eight sixth grade students discussing four realistic fiction Hispanic-American multicultural stories with universal themes by Gary Soto in peer-led literature discussion groups. The results indicate the importance of a reader's sociocultural frame--class, race, and gender, on their interpretation of…

It has often been observed that Alice Munro is a master of narrative complexity. "The love of a good woman", in particular, is a story that challenges conventional notions of structure in short fiction through digression or deferral, discontinuity, layering, and so on. Ross (2002) rightly observes that conventional theories of reading fail to get…

In this article, the author provides a rationale for the use of children's literature to study Mexico and to learn a framework by which to consider people around the world and the universals of culture, including principles for using books in the unit. An appendix contains a description of children's fiction and biography, nonfiction, reference…

This article classifies and describes a selection of mathematical fiction. It also provides some practical activities teachers or parents can use to help make the mathematics more explicit and engaging for their children. Not many people, apart from primary teachers, are aware of mathematical fiction or mathematical picture storybooks, although…

The author describes his approach to retelling Arthurian legends, where he wrote two stories in tandem: one a historical novel in which a boy, eager to serve as a squire and to go on crusade, is given a piece of obsidian, the other of stories, the Arthurian legends, that this boy sees in the obsidian. These became a trilogy. He states that while…

The author describes the issues raised for him by team-teaching a course on the Shoah that aimed to incorporate familial, historical, and rhetorical perspectives. Considering firsthand testimonies, songs written by camp inmates, renderings of others' stories such as Art Spiegelman's "Maus," and works of fiction and poetry by writers without…

This study investigates the effects of integrating literacy instruction with biology coursework on high school student learning. It would investigate the relationship between the growth in reading achievement and biology learning. It will target schools serving especially large populations of African American and Latino students. The project will…

This study examines how teachers' use of affective strategies (voice intonation, dramatization, personal involvement comments) during the reading and discussion of books influence young children's affective reactions (dramatization, personal engagement, language play comments). Twenty kindergarten teachers read four books, two fiction and two…

The 4th international conference "Nation and Language: Modern Aspects of Socio-Linguistic Development" continues an eight-year old tradition. The conference is organized by Kaunas University of Technology Panevezys Institute and aims to bring scientists and researchers together for a general scientific discussion on new trends in…

This paper presents aspects of a study in progress on the legitimate function of fiction in research. A section on methodology describes how the study started with a project of narratives written in response to the black and white photographs of one of the collaborators. Analysis of the response process revealed a connection between fiction and…