This article is based on the premise that mandated reading in literature classrooms may be perceived as an imposition and disliked by students. Attempts to address that scenario have suggested that text selection should be given more consideration to promote reading engagement, particularly by choosing texts which are familiar to the lifeworlds of…

Discourses of reading for pleasure have seldom addressed the multiple and complex digital media practices of children and young people or the changing nature of literacy. This article explores the affective encounters that are generated in the relations between readers, digital texts and things by applying Bennett's notion of enchantment. Using…

In this paper I discuss how taking a particular literary theory--the implied reader--serves to offer a focus for the teacher's initial reading of a text and provides a formative assessment tool. Iser's Implied Reader theory is discussed, after which a picture book, "Where the Forest Meets the Sea" by Jeannie Baker, is analysed from this…

This article presents aspects of a research study into how a group of ten- and eleven-year-old students (in 5th Grade in Sydney, Australia) were apprenticed to view a literary text from critical reading positions. These ways of reading were an alternative to their more typical reader response interpretations of texts. The article contrasts…