Background: Mobile e-books together with Blackboard LMS and Elluminate were integrated and used as extensive reading activities, i.e., as a supplement to in-class reading instruction. The aim of the activity was to develop EFL struggling freshman student readers enhance their reading skills through short, simplified e-books. Materials and Methods:…

To be able to read well as well as to manage one's own reading is important because it leads to the development of learner autonomy, which is necessary for learners in the 21st century. The present study investigates the effects of integration of a blended learning and extensive reading instructional model on Thai EFL undergraduate students'…

Coombe Boys' School in New Malden worked with Kingston University to establish a 'Big Read', a scheme of pre-arrival shared-reading for boys transitioning from local primary schools into year 7 of the Coombe Boys' secondary school. A novel was chosen for shared-reading, and all arriving pupils were given a copy at their Induction Day (at the end…

This study highlights the need to promote more personal and informal processes in Teacher Autonomy and focuses on university Language Teachers' processes in reading Teacher Research (TR) in order to understand how this impacts their autonomy development processes. In particular, it addresses teachers' interactions with TR articles during the…

Preemptive censorship occurs when educators avoid particular books because they dislike the ideas or values the books contain or fear the controversy the books may evoke. Although not as blatant as other forms of censorship, preemptive censorship has the unfortunate consequence of restricting children's access to ideas and information. Moreover,…

One place to start understanding how pre-service teachers learn about contemporary young adult (YA) literature, especially those works that feature lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning (LGBTQ) and gender identity themes and characters, is through an examination of the YA literature course--a course many pre-service teachers take as…

Tensions and contradictions in my personal practice and in the extant research prompted this study of preservice teachers' responses to trans-themed young adult literature. I adopted a self-study methodology to identify and address the shortcomings in my practice of including trans-themed literature in a Literature for Adolescents course. Through…

Five teacher educators discuss children's literature addressing Earth's changing climate. They present tools for evaluating the quality of resources likely to help teachers and students stimulate conceptual and emotional development rather than anxiety or oversimplification. An annotated selection of current books along with a checklist to…

This paper proposes a way of integrating self-directed reading into a collaborative classroom with formative and summative tasks as well as facilitating integration with the target culture, and familiarity with the target language in a variety of settings. Linking to literature on motivation, and drawing on case-study experience, an approach to…

This study aims to augment the current understanding of how practicing teachers perceive and implement disciplinary literacy and in what ways they collaborate with researchers in a disciplinary literacy project. To do this, we collected and analyzed transcripts of the meetings from a disciplinary literacy project that was a university-school…

The use of quality texts in elementary classrooms plays a major role in children's literacy development. Quality children's literature helps learners develop into skilled readers and writers with increased gains in vocabulary knowledge and comprehension. This paper demonstrates how pre-service teachers gained an understanding of the educational…

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…

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…