Recently, an awareness of the value of representation has demanded an expanded canon of texts that includes those concerning children with illnesses. Research shows that reading such texts to children with illnesses or disabilities has proven validating, comforting, and helpful in the development of a positive self-image (Goddard, 2011). This…

This article disrupts dominant discourses around boys and reading that often homogenise young males as reluctant, disengaged and, at times, adversarial readers. Rather than essentialising boys, we argue there is a need for a more sophisticated knowledge base about the influences, constraints and diverse experiences of boys as readers in society…

Children's literature can be both a reflective mirror to readers' lives and a window to new worlds, making teachers' selection of texts for students an important professional activity. Researchers have consistently found that teachers' choices of literature contain limited representations of ethnicities, cultures, and disabilities, and reinforce…

This study focuses on the relationship between teacher-text-child interactions during shared picturebook reading and its effect on children's narrative comprehension. Using a micro-analytic approach, we studied nine large-group bookreading sessions of one experienced teacher and her classroom of 17 preschoolers from low-income backgrounds over a…

The nature of English as a school subject -- and particularly English literature -- is a longstanding issue of debate for practitioners and researchers internationally. One dimension of this concerns the forces that shape the diet of literary texts that students are fed. In this study, we draw on the ecological model of agency to interrogate the…

This study sought to find out whether educated Arabs read paper or digital materials; which reading technologies they use; amount of material they read; the place where they read; how much time they spend on reading; when they read; how they reduce distractions; how they motivate themselves to read; how they interact with the text; their reading…

Didacticism is an indispensable factor in the study of children's literature, not only within the text, but also within activities such as choosing books. This article explores didacticism in children's literature and the parent-child power structure within the relatively unexplored area of the book choices of Chinese parents and children who read…

This paper explores how teachers in training co-created a canon of texts for teaching about trauma issues, including sexual violence. This paper represents a piece of a larger feminist study where 23 teacher candidate participants took up readings in a sexual trauma text set and responded to pedagogy for teaching such texts with Canadian…

Teachers' decision-making about resource selection is made more complex when resources are appraised for their potential to raise controversial issues or cause offence to others within school communities. Debates around the use of trigger warnings, freedom of speech and the impact of exclusionary practices further complicate these processes. In…

Despite the changing school demographics indicating an increasingly greater diversity in today's classrooms, research indicates how teachers have little cognizance of the cultural backgrounds of their students. This becomes an issue among gifted students who are double minorities: those who are gifted and of a different cultural background, or of…

This article explores the benefits and problems of teaching with challenged books in the English language arts classroom. Challenged books initiate important discussions and provide opportunities for students to explore diverse perspectives. Methods for helping teachers and schools prepare for potential challenges are also discussed. The authors…

The authors discuss how teachers can select picture books to fully recognize the lives and identities of refugee-background learners, counter harmful myths, and address forced displacement in their classrooms.

The author, a former early grades teacher, recounts how she overcome erratic curriculum implementation to find her own way to effective reading instruction. What worked for her was an emphasis on explicit phonics in the context of providing engaging and relevant reading material for her students. "As a matter of educating the whole…

Black youth deserve rich opportunities to cultivate their own reading identities, says Kimberly Parker, cofounder of #DisruptTexts. In connecting them to their reading identities, teachers must cultivate these students' ability to see themselves as deserving of literacy and the freedom that being literate brings. Writes Parker, "We can ask…

Building a culture of reading in secondary schools is "like training for a marathon or losing 50 pounds: Every big shift is built--and sustained--by small, incremental steps." In this article, "Book Love" author Penny Kittle describes specific strategies that middle and high school educators can use to set the conditions for…