A survey of Alabama language arts teachers convinced one professor of English teacher education that there are good reasons for incorporating multicultural literature into the classroom, and that it seems especially appropriate for a reader response approach. Since multicultural literature may be as new for the teacher as for the student, teachers…

A study examined children's theme comprehension of non-religious moral children's stories. The study used 3 tasks of ascending difficulty: (1) selecting the moral theme when it is found in a multiple-choice context; (2) identifying the story-with-the-same-message when the message is found in a new context; and (3) moral message construction (a…

A year-long ethnographic case study examined two public city high school English teachers' efforts to reform their literature instruction and evaluation practices through the use of portfolios. One case study teacher ("William") has 30 years of teaching experience and was heavily influenced by New Criticism. The other teacher…

Writing is at the heart of education. The business of English teachers is to make people more comfortable in using language, particularly written language. Language serves two broad functions: (1) representing elements of external reality; and (2) defining relationships among the people who use the language. The writer's first need is to use the…

A study examined the ways teachers and children in a preschool classroom enacted informal book-reading and other informal book-related events. Four key patterns in children's activities and teachers' curricular responses were identified: (1) children naturally selected their own "themes" for reading at the book center, and often these themes were…

A study determined whether using reader response logs in an introductory college literature class would prove to be an effective method of helping students learn to apply the critical methodology important to increasing understanding of literature. Subjects, 33 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory literature course, wrote response…

The point of view that teachers use in responding to students' writing affects the kinds of dramatized presences that teacher responses create. Such presences make available a range of reading and writing roles that students may adopt or reject. For a dramatic presence to be felt by a reader, a writer must select and sustain a clear means of…

More than 100 decontextualized, formalistic paradigms of the narrative process are in existence, but little work has been done to apply the insights narrative theory yields to news and journalistic form. Given the journalistic assumption that facts can be presented neutrally, news professionals tend to maintain that narratives do not exist outside…

Following up research by Radway and others on readers of romance novels, a study, employing a reader-response approach, was conducted with 18 female adolescent readers of romances to discover if they perceived and enjoyed the novels in ways appreciably different from other readers. The subjects filled out questionnaires about their romance novel…

In addition to her work as novelist and critic, Eudora Welty is also a valuable resource for the teaching of composition, particularly through both her theory and example, for she is always writing about writing. Many of Welty's essays on literary theory speak to problems encountered in the college writing class. Perhaps the most accessible text…

A college-level course in business literature is an ideal place to raise and discuss ethical issues. To be successful, a teacher of this course must engage student interest, help the students articulate and understand their own ethical attitudes, clarify the stance and artistry of the author, and refine student responses to ethical questions. When…

Poetry of the romantic age is often uninviting to students, leaving them puzzled because they do not sense the connections between the poetry and themselves. Yet, much romantic poetry can be enjoyed and comprehended if approached in terms of some personal, reflective, and connective readings. Wordsworth and Whitman are often avoided because they…

The Flesch readability index yields meaningful information about the responses of readers to texts. Because the formula is so simple, a group of English teachers wrote a program in BASIC that would count some obvious surface features of a text and calculate Flesch scores. Among the programing problems encountered were counting words (taking into…

The spontaneous use of imaging and its relationships to verbal recall and literary analysis were investigated in a study in which 72 college students read a literary text under one of three sets of instructions that manipulated processing depth in an externally valid fashion. Imagery reports and free verbal recalls of the story were collected…

A study investigated the effects on students' cognitive development of a freshman composition course in which reading, writing, and discussion were integrated in an attempt to increase students' awareness of ambiguities, uncertainties, and complexities. The design of the one-semester course was derived from William Perry's theory of…