Intended as an aid to classroom teachers, this 48-page handbook presents a literature unit based on the children's book, "The Giver" by Lois Lowry. It begins with sample lesson plans, pre-reading activities, author information, a book summary, and vocabulary lists and suggested vocabulary activities. Next, chapters of "The…

This is a guide to nonfiction, selective fiction, and videos for young people searching for answers. Its assortment of titles can give adolescents, ages 12 to 18, a better understanding of growing up in a rapidly changing world. With a few exceptions, most of the material included here has been published since 1990 and is currently available. The…

This book tells the fictional story of Olga, the wife of Chief Stephen, leader of a Tanaina Athapascan village on Cook Inlet, northwest of Anchorage, Alaska. Olga works for one full year with great courage and independence trapping ground squirrels and gathering materials needed to tan, dye, and sew furs to make a parka for her husband. She uses…

The use of rhetorical voice in literature and news reporting is examined and its implications for classroom study of literature are discussed. Analysis is based on Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel and the definition of "voice" as an identifiable social role or position that a character enacts, and "ventriloquation" as the…

Designed to help teachers, librarians, and parents introduce books of exceptional literary and artistic merit, accuracy, and appeal to preschool through sixth grade children, this annotated bibliography presents nearly 1,800 annotations of approximately 2,000 books (2 or more books in a series appear in a single review) published between 1988 and…

The essays in this collection are about neglected classics of children's fiction. The essays first appeared in the "Washington Post" and the "Los Angeles Times." With a scope limited to those works (mostly from the 20th-century) already overlooked or in danger of slipping from view, the 30 essays lead the reader through a wide…

This unit, designed for use in both history and English classes, uses excerpts from novels as a way to view Nigerian culture and history through the eyes of its people. The literature used comes primarily from the work of two of Nigeria's important novelists: Chinua Achebe and Buchi Emecheta. Both offer views from the Igbo culture of southeast…

Columbus (Georgia) College's Challenge Squared program consists of three 2-week enrichment day camps for gifted students in grades 5 through 10. In past years, students have worked with an artist to create local history murals and have written and produced video plays in cooperation with a media specialist. Most recently, students were involved in…

Materials appropriate for family literacy programs, defined as any literacy effort that includes either children or adults or both working toward literacy in a family context, are described. The 19 books selected and annotated for this guide, all published between 1989 and 1991, meet the standard criteria for inclusion in the Free Library of…

This book identifies appropriate reading material for adults who read at levels through grade seven. An introduction lists criteria used for selection and discusses emphases in selection of nonfiction. To make this recommended list of 748 entries most useful to libraries, titles are arranged in a very general Dewey Decimal Classification. Each…

A study was conducted to explore the ways in which instructional method and text quality influence the young reader's interpretation of inside view and character plans in fiction. Thirty-six third graders from a northeastern, suburban, public elementary school served as subjects. Twelve children were selected randomly from students rated as…

Intended to provide teachers with a list of recently published books recommended for children, this annotated booklist cites titles of children's trade books selected for their literary and artistic quality. The annotations in the booklist include a critical statement about each book as well as a brief description of the content, and--where…

A selection of romances from medieval literature can be used successfully in undergraduate literature classes to trace the appearance and relevance of medieval themes, motifs, and characters in works of modern poetry, fiction, and film. New scholarly editions, historiographies, translations, and modernizations give both teachers and students more…

Noting that there are signs of a relaxation in the long tension caused by the methodological "cold war" between quantitative and qualitative research proponents, this paper points to communications research as one area where the trend is developing. Placing communications studies in the framework of current public attitudes toward…

A computer program devised to analyze text by the use of case grammar is described. The program tests a text against the expectations created by a narrative situation and by the connotative values in the narrator's choice of words. It determines spatial concepts attached to various English words and analyzes the spatial relationships in syntactic…