In this article, the authors discuss the results of a study of student reading in a general literature course at a mid-sized state university. Data collection and analysis included 216 samples of student writing from four sections of the course and interviews with six teachers of the course. Results indicate that when students chooses texts to…

Much has been written about the ways in which Black boys are often underserved in literacy classroom in the United States. Relatively little has been documented about the literacy strategies that are yielding promising outcomes in this study group. The purpose of this integrated literature review is to identify what we call promising literacy…

Disciplinary literacy encompasses not only the ability to read the texts of a discipline, but also to engage in the practices and discourse of that discipline. At the center of the discipline of history is inquiry. For these students to move from their ninth grade expectations about history toward the authentic discipline of history, they would…

This article discusses diversity issues evident in fairy tales and explores the pedagogical implications for adding counter-narratives in the school curriculum. Critical Race Theory is employed. In order to uncover contradictory discourses of race within Black cultures, four Africana (African, African American, and Caribbean) Cinderella tale types…

University educators work with preservice teachers who often feel overwhelmed when facing high school science classrooms full of reluctant readers. These struggling students often have various special-education modifications or are English language learners (ELLs) with different degrees of language proficiency. Teachers report that these students…

This article uses the findings from an empirical study on Hong Kong students' reading practices as collected through face-to-face interviews on major university campuses in Hong Kong to argue for the importance of "affective" and "imaginative" engagement with literary texts if students are to develop an interest in reading.…

Textbooks are a vital component in many higher education contexts. Increasing textbook prices, coupled with general rising costs of higher education have led some instructors to experiment with substituting open educational resources (OER) for commercial textbooks as their primary class curriculum. This article synthesizes the results of 16…

This pilot study examined multilingual university students' willingness to engage in voluntary extensive reading (ER) of books after they received training. The research questions were whether training appeared to promote self-efficacy, motivation for the task, use of metacognitive strategies, and independent reading. University freshmen in an ESL…

This article asks: What messages are school librarians sending to students of color if the only authors invited to visit schools are white? The author argues that bringing authors of color--image makers--to schools to speak to, and work with, students of color is a vital piece of culturally relevant library practice. School librarians must…

The author of 80 books, most recently "HYPNOTIZE ME," discusses the unique challenges of engaging reluctant and sometimes openly hostile boys by creating the kind of stories that will hook them in and turn them into lifelong readers.

Culturally relevant text selection and pedagogy support students' motivation, engagement, literacy outcomes, and positive identity formation. Nevertheless, there is limited research on teacher preparation that fosters these outcomes. We explore 17 preservice teachers' challenges and successes with culturally relevant text selection and pedagogy…

In this article, John Macalister draws attention to the fact that the term "extensive reading" can have multiple meanings. It has been used to include breadth of reading and time spent reading, as well as both amount of new reading and amount of text read. It is, therefore, perhaps unsurprising that teachers can hold differing views as…

Genius Hour is a time built into the school day or week to enable students to actively create their learning rather than passively consume it. During the time set aside for Genius Hour, students choose what they will learn about, the strategies they will use to learn it, the pace of their work, the materials and resources they will use, and the…

New scholarship advocates that students should learn deeply and well. Little information exists on exactly how to get students deeply into material so that they understand it inside and out, backward and forward and in a way that enables them to construct knowledge schemas. The authors have developed a heuristic list of communication response…

This article discusses one teacher's efforts to give their students a mentor text for a persuasive, research-based writing project. The author's shift from assigning predominantly fiction to focusing more on nonfiction came as a result of their efforts to help their students move from students' current writing style -- that of a five-paragraph…