Purpose: This study aims to explore the authentic questioning practices of English Language Arts teachers. Although language arts (LA) education emphasizes the value of authentic questions in discussions about literature, teachers still tend to ask known-answer questions that guide students toward one literary interpretation. However, outside…

The current study examined the extent to which the cohesion detected in readers' constructed responses to multiple documents was predictive of persuasive, source-based essay quality. Participants (N=95) completed multiple-documents reading tasks wherein they were prompted to think-aloud, self-explain, or evaluate the sources while reading a set of…

This study is situated within a male-dominated Palestinian-Israeli reality rife with issues of gender privilege. With a purpose to disrupt the status quo in my language classroom and positively affect students' beliefs towards gender injustices, I, as a teacher researcher, designed a unit on gender issues including a book set that would challenge…

This essay uses the metaphor of "savvy travelling" to discuss the limitations and problems associated with three current "best practice" approaches to the reading of literature in upper grade levels, particularly in the United States: close reading, response-based reading, and disciplinary literacy. A "savvy" approach…

When schools present texts through their explicit curricula, they infuse those stories with a certain perceived value (Eisner, 2002). When those accounts all ring with the same voice, they promote the merit of those people represented over those excluded (Haslem, 1998). In this study, we explored how White high school students responded to…

This article presents the work of two female students in a rural school who were assigned to respond to a Shakespearean text with a Digital Video (DV) project. The study shows how the teacher provided students appropriate time, mediation, and space in allowing them to bring their out-of-school literacies and interests within an academic context.…

Purpose: Using a discourse analytic approach, the purpose of this paper is to examine how genre impacts white readers when reading about historic acts of racial violence. Specifically, this study explores one white high school student's stance-taking as she read an informational text and an eyewitness narrative about the Tulsa Race Massacre.…

Anti-immigrant vitriol is growing, even disturbing our educational spaces. Teachers are also affected by the negative discourses around them and need to develop knowledge that shapes their attitudes and actions regarding immigrant youth. This article details a professional development with high school teachers that used reader response to develop…

This research was a 12-week-long study of six participants attending the same alternative high school in a suburban district in the northeast of the United States. Rosenblatt's Reader Response Theory and interpretative qualitative methodology were used to examine participants' reactions to reading self-selected young adult (YA) literature during…

In this article, the authors reflect on their experiences of integrating visual arts, specifically painting, into an English language arts curriculum. Although each of them had previously used art as a response to literature with our students, neither of them had before collaborated with professional artists or been as intentional about…

This paper highlights how the social world understandings of Rey, an 11th grade Latino student, supported his exploration into and insights of a short story. This work is grounded in the Cultural Modelling Framework. This framework provides students with the chance to acquire important comprehension strategies needed to interpret complex fiction…

This action research study evaluated a problem of practice which emerged from the apathy and passive responses of students to reading classic literature in the high school English classroom. Teachers instructed while students received information with little investment on their part. The purpose of this study was to determine how to help students…

In this article, the author discusses how teachers can develop empathy in students through reading and writing about literature, which contributes to their development as citizens in a global community. By choosing texts that trigger empathic reactions, English teachers can help students better understand others' experiences with oppression and…

Since pairing the classics with young adult literature can increase reading comprehension and spark interest amongst our students, this essay explores a unit plan for connecting Will Hobbs's "Downriver" (1991) with William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" (1954). Both works espouse significant and timely themes: the importance of…

In this study, we investigated the degree to which the cognitive processes in which students engage during reading comprehension could be examined through dynamical analyses of their natural language responses to texts. High school students (n = 142) generated typed self-explanations while reading a science text. They then completed a…