Student enjoyment is important when creating any unit, but teachers should also consider if an activity will enhance learning. In addition to being enjoyable, drama-based activities enrich learning by disrupting passivity, encouraging participation, and enhancing comprehension. This article showcases ways to include these activities in a unit…

This paper investigates the language demands of creating texts in the English classroom, which involve transformations in context. In particular, it focuses on the tensions inherent in tasks which require more traditional textual analysis to be presented in ways other than traditional 'essay' format. These tasks are interpreted differently by…

The project addressed the debate over supplemental literature: young adult or classic selections to better support teaching ninth graders Tennessee's English I curriculum standards. Research supported both classical and contemporary literature for teaching ninth graders, making it difficult to determine which type of literature might produce the…

This article reports and discusses the findings of an initial inquiry into secondary school students' comprehension strategy use during small-group, peer-led discussions of literary text. One classroom of ninth-grade English students in the midwestern United States participated in the inquiry. Data consisted of the verbatim transcripts of four…

Although young adult literature is often recommended as a reading bridge to the classics, Stallworth insists that the genre deserves a prominent place in the middle school canon in its own right. She describes several examples from middle school classrooms of how young adult novels can enhance tweens' "life literacy" by both helping them develop…

Throughout seven years of teaching in urban schools, the author discovered that the most effective ways to teach difficult literary texts was to refer to students' out-of-school activities. In other words, to connect the "leaky edges of the "social outside"" with the "individual inside" is to create a curriculum of…