This article discusses a study that explored first-grade students' responses to and interpretations of eight picture books with metafictive devices. The article focuses on children's visual and written responses to the picture books and describes the relationship between the students' visual and verbal texts with respect to storytelling. The two…

This study offers an alternative to traditional notions of scaffolding for reading comprehension by tracing the evolution of a fifth-grade small group literature conversation in which the teacher sought to displace himself as "primary knower" (Berry, 1981) in the conversation. The study examines how the teacher shared evaluation with his…

This paper describes a study designed to find out whether children's reading would be affected by line spacing that is wider or narrower than the commonly used default values. The realistic, high quality test material was set using a range of four different line spacing values, and twenty-four children in Years 1 and 2 (between five and seven…

This article presents a case study of a fourth grade boy's experiences in writing, preceding and following a story he wrote about a boy whose struggles in writing led directly to his death. We explore how Max's writing experiences related to his identity, specifically his sense of himself as a writer, his struggle to communicate his ideas, and his…

The Radical Change conceptual framework provides theory for understanding, appreciating, and evaluating three types of significant change in contemporary literature for children and youth: changing forms and formats, changing perspectives, and changing boundaries. A paucity of research has explored primary students' literary understandings of and…

Often the victims of bullying are singled out because they are different from the majority. The fear of being bullied is a life-shaping fear that effects the lives of more than 160,000 students who miss school every day to avoid victimization by bullies. The damaging effects of bullying can lead to poor academic performance, low self-esteem, early…

This article discusses a reading instruction applicable to widely diverse classrooms, because it weaves together dynamic strands from three approaches to teaching reading: literature circle method, reciprocal teaching, and modern literary theories. The author presents three stages to achieve reading success: (1) applying the key features of…

The three books reviewed in this article represent the continuous effort to make visible the significant bridge between theory and practice in the fields of literacy and children's literature. While the authors maintain distinct purposes for their creations, the texts each speak to a strong theoretical support for the practices they describe. The…

This article describes an investigation with a class of seventh graders to determine what impact the study of traditional literature would have on their narrative writing. The classroom teacher emphasized the narrative structure of the traditional literature genre by prompting his students to respond both orally and in writing with their thoughts…

This article describes a research study that implemented literacy methods for the purpose of promoting reading comprehension with links to student writing through the practice of integrating reader response before, during, and following teacher read-alouds, and then extending the reader response into the composing process of student-created…

Close to 1,100 people attended the 55th Annual Meeting of the National Reading Conference at the Intercontinental Hotel in Miami, Florida from November 30-December 3, 2005. A record number of proposals were submitted this year (548), with 392 papers, symposia, and round tables accepted. This year's conference theme was inclusiveness and synthesis…