Existing work on literacy and affect has posed important questions for how we think about meanings and how and where they get made. The authors contribute to such work by focusing on the relation between text and affect. This is a topic that has received insufficient attention in recent work but is of pressing concern for education as text…

As university teachers of literature, we tend to accept the rhetoric that students lack the capacity to interpret texts meaningfully, without questioning our own biases about the kinds of meaning we expect them to elicit from texts. Often, these are meanings that have little relevance to students' own social or professional lives. In this article,…

Since the late 20th century, scholars have called for a need to broaden the aims of teaching English Literature away from its Eurocentric focus. Much effort has also been invested in making the subject more relevant through diversifying the texts studied and connecting texts to current social and global issues. It is pertinent now to ask what the…

Although the aims of literary study have often been spelled out in ethical terms, scholars have tended to discuss the how of literary interpretation in more ethically neutral terms. Reading pedagogical enactments of two predominant theories of literary interpretation--New Criticism and reader response--through the lens of Rancièrean ethics, I…

Experienced readers of literature are more likely than novices to identify aspects of text that are salient to literary interpretation and to construct figurative meanings and thematic inferences from literary texts. This quasi-experimental study explores the hypothesis that novice readers can be supported in constructing literary interpretations…

Scholars have argued for reading and discussing children's and young adult literature containing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or questioning (LGBTQ) characters and related themes with youths. Yet, we know very little about how to do this among LGBTQ people and their allies. This study examined 18 transcripts of talk from a literature…

The engagement of immigrant children in literature discussion groups in an elementary school classroom in the United States is studied in this article. The analysis shows how the students' responses are embedded in translocal movements across places, time, and people that can be characterized as constructing dynamic cultural flows. The findings…

This study assessed the utility of document prevalence and familiarity as predictors of adult document literacy performance. Three indexes--quantifying document prevalence, document familiarity, and the frequency of document use--were constructed using survey responses from an adult community sample and documents collected from government agencies…

Indicates that frequent one-to-one story readings in a school setting increased the number and complexity of comments and questions from a group of four-year-old children of low socioeconomic status. (ARH)

Examines conversations between teachers and students and between peers to describe the nature of the instructional scaffolding that occurred as students constructed meaning of literary and nonfiction texts. Describes ways in which scaffolding was woven in and out of the fabric of the conversations. Finds that episodes of scaffolded instruction…

Uses categorization methodology to investigate the structure of readers' emotional responses to a story. Notes that separate latent partition analysis for two groups of college students yielded category structures that closely matched each other. Suggests that categorization methodology provides a promising technique for investigating the…

Analyzes the effort of a small group of high school seniors to interpret the character of Laertes in Shakespeare's "Hamlet" through a "body biography," a life-sized human outline they filled with images and words representing their understanding of the character. Examines their discussion as they composed their text. (PA)

Analyzes the effects of using carefully assisted case studies to prepare preservice teachers to be more knowledgeable and skilled in supporting children's response to literature. Notes that over the course of a school year, teachers moved towards a vision of literary response that highlights the interpretation over comprehension. (RS)

Explores reader and text effects on the production of mental imagery during and after reading a poem, a story, and two expository texts. Finds that imagery occurs spontaneously during and after reading all texts and that the production of imagery is affected by both reader and text. (RS)

Describes a reader response study indicating (1) a high degree of agreement on reader beliefs and text events and (2) that students who empathized with a particular character identified the story conflict as pertaining to that character. Suggests specific reader-based and text-based factors that produce convergence and divergence in reader…