Teachers may need tools to use video for reflection toward ongoing toward education and teacher leadership. Based on Goodman's (1996) notion of retrospective miscue analysis, a method of reading instruction that revalues the reader and his or her strategies, retrospective video analysis guides teachers in appreciating and understanding their own…

AP Literature students participated in a series of real-time online discussions to complement the in-class conversations they were having about "The Autobiography of Malcolm X." Thus, the front channel was comprised of the students who were discussing the class text aloud, and the backchannel was the online conversation the rest of the…

Recent initiatives in the United States and United Kingdom have added greatly to the amount and quality of research on the effectiveness of secondary reading programs, especially programs for struggling readers. In this review of the experimental research on secondary reading programs, the authors focused on 69 studies that used random assignment…

A fresh look at the reader response theory to enhance student comprehension through meaningful interactions with literature, this paper explores the instructional implications of a reader response approach in secondary classrooms and examines its role in fostering students' critical reading and thinking skills. The approach promotes transaction…

Intelligent tutoring systems for ill-defined domains, such as reading and writing, are critically needed, yet uncommon. Two such systems, the Interactive Strategy Training for Active Reading and Thinking (iSTART) and Writing Pal (W-Pal) use natural language processing (NLP) to assess learners' written (i.e., typed) responses and provide immediate,…

Stuart McLean refers in this commentary to Jeffrey Huffman's article "Reading Rate Gains during a One-Semester Extensive Reading Course" (v26 n2 p17-33 Oct 2014) [See: EJ1044344], in which Huffman reports that extensive reading (ER) was an effective way to provide large amounts of comprehensible input to foreign language learners, but…

This chapter first looks at Extensive Reading and Extensive Listening separately, highlighting the language learning benefits of the two approaches to language learning. It then discusses ways of implementing the two together in input-poor L2 contexts where the quantity and quality of the target language input tends to be severely limited. In…

Visualizing the events described in a text is crucial for constructing a rich and coherent visuospatial mental representation (i.e., situation model) of the text. According to current reading comprehension theories, the construction of such a situation model likely involves all sensory modalities. However, at present these insights are hardly used…

In an exploration of methods to advance language acquisition without the inconvenience of participating in an immersion option, the authors discovered research on Free Voluntary Reading (FVR). FVR has made a recent resurgence, especially in the context of language acquisition. Krashen (2004) proposes FVR as the answer to building language…

Huddled around a table, a group of English teachers eagerly discuss their chosen book club young adult novels. The authors appreciate that these texts explore how social injustice and inequity influence people's worlds. The novels invite teachers to consider the perspectives of those whose viewpoints and experiences differ from their own. With an…

In first-year writing (FYW), instructors want students to understand how reading texts in particular ways affects how and what they learn and, in turn, how and what they might communicate to their own readers. Because students tend to come to FYW predisposed to notice more visual aspects (e.g., headings, bulleted lists) than verbal aspects (e.g.,…

Among educators in the field of language and literature, in the German-speaking world and beyond, the concept of "competence" has been gaining ground for three decades. This article questions the validity of prevalent competence definitions, which by focusing on the proficiency of an individual student ignore the fact that in…

In pre-service and in-service language teacher education, and in curriculum-related projects in second and foreign language settings, a recurrent issue is the failure to relate the teaching of reading to reading as a meaning-making activity. In this paper, I will consider what current research on second language (L2) reading has actually succeeded…

This commentary offers a critique of literacy pedagogy that focuses solely upon a best practices approach to teaching and learning and argues for a relational pedagogy that relies upon diffractive thinking, reading, and writing.

This essay explores the use of undergraduate research posters in English literature classrooms; at the same time, it argues for a scholarship of teaching and learning responsive to how meaning is constructed in the arts and humanities. Our scholarly practice requires interaction with texts and with each other, yet the undergraduate research paper…