In this paper, we analyse a group of 6 and 7 year olds' interactions during a literacy event. We explore the complexities of their meaning-making following a read aloud of Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak 1963). Our focus is on discourses of gender/sex/uality, a term that acknowledges the complex relationship between gender, sex and sexuality,…

The responses children make during read-alouds bridge meaning from stories. Educators must grasp the value of children's responses and reactions to literature. Children's discourse is central to the reading process; thus, children must be allowed to participate in this learning process. Due to this, the read-aloud process in the classroom should…

All children are placemakers (Chawla, 1992). While we know that a child's sense of place is linked to a sense of belonging (Brillante & Mankiw, 2015), the implications of placemaking in the lived experiences of child readers, specifically, has not been widely explored. The primary purpose of this literature review is to aid reader response…

Literacy educators, spurred by curricular standards requiring increased attention to reading nonfiction, are compelled to consider text-specific reading instruction. As research supports the connection between motivation and reading achievement, these mandates beg the question, "Are children equally motivated to read fiction and…

Discourses of reading for pleasure have seldom addressed the multiple and complex digital media practices of children and young people or the changing nature of literacy. This article explores the affective encounters that are generated in the relations between readers, digital texts and things by applying Bennett's notion of enchantment. Using…

Picture books, as both sophisticated aesthetic objects and literary texts, provide the ideal site for critically examining how values and ideology are transmitted to children. How the child reader might be affected by the process of reading a picture book--that is, how he or she might be moved emotionally and potentially gain new insights about…

This study explored five adults' experiences of place within their middle childhood literacy life-worlds. Middle childhood, the stage of development in which children often acquire reading independence, is also characterized by significant increases in children's geographic accessibility and independence. The findings propose that in the literacy…

This article gives a brief overview of reader response theory before sharing the views of some nine-year-old children working collaboratively as part of a community of readers. Prior to responding to some philosophical picturebooks the children talked about what they thought philosophy was, they then shared their thoughts on some of the very…

The paper presents findings from a reader response study conducted in February 2013 with 150 children aged 7-11 in which they discussed extracts and clips from Roald Dahl's "Matilda" (1988) and its cinematic adaptation (1996). Dahl and "Matilda" were chosen because they provoke emphatic responses from adults, often commenting…

This article describes part of a study that explored the responses of nine- and ten-year-old children during a picture book read aloud in a small group setting in a New Zealand classroom. The read aloud was interactive, where the participants were encouraged to respond to the book and to each other throughout the session. The authors created a…

We reply to three critiques regarding our reporting that White, English-speaking children are much more likely than otherwise similar racial, ethnic, and language minority children to receive special education services in the United States. We show how each critique is unsound. We present further evidence of the robustness of our findings.

In this technical comment, we argue that Morgan et al.'s claim that there is no minority overrepresentation in special education is in error due to (a) sampling considerations, (b) inadequate support from previous and current analyses, and (c) their failure to consider the complexities of special education disproportionality. [For Morgan et al.'s…

This qualitative case study explores the nature of reading engagement, taking a reader response approach to analysing and discussing the experiences and perspectives of real readers. The paper reports a collaborative research project in which a group of five primary-age children and a group of five adults of different ages were asked to read and…

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to describe four children's lived spiritual experiences of literary texts as generated through their responses to two toy fantasy novels for children, "The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane" by Kate DiCamillo (2006) and "The Mouse and his Child" by Russell Hoban (1967). The…

The purpose of this study was to examine how the social practices of African American families--with children in grades K-2--changed as a result of participating in a family literacy program utilizing African American children's literature. The families were exposed, through a series of workshops, to an abundance of children's literature…