Purpose: This study aims to investigate how, through text-based classroom talk, youth collaboratively draw on and remix discourses and practices from multiple socially indexed traditions. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on data from a year-long social design experiment, this study uses qualitative coding and traces discoursal markers of…

Moving beyond purposes for reading as fixed outcomes, this dissertation project explores the possibilities of affect theory for decentering or weakening those purposes so they might be seen as one element among many interacting in the classroom space. Because these purposes become the expected outcomes of reading with youth in secondary English…

This article describes an assignment piloted in spring of 2008 called the Rhetorical Analysis Project, which required students to analyze three different texts addressing a common issue, compose an argument about the representation of that issue as illustrated by those texts, and revise that argument to match a rhetorical model they chose from…

The teacher's authority in matters of interpretation comes from his greater experience as a reader--and he does students a disservice if he does not exercise that authority. (JH)

The tendency to think of a literary work as an object or entity existing apart from author and reader has been the greatest stumbling block in literary criticism and the teaching of literature. The transaction between a reader and a text involves the reader in a highly complex, ongoing process of selection and organization. Keeping the reader's…

The reader has replaced the text as the central figure in the teaching of literature. Three techniques that psychologists and educational researchers believe produce better reading comprehension are: the concept of schemata, or the kind of mental outline a reader has when perceiving something; the acquisition or development of an appropriate…

During the past 15 years, a fundamental change has taken place in literary criticism, with a decline in New Criticism (literature viewed as a public object) and an increase in reader response criticism (literature viewed as a private experience). New Critics considered the meaning of a literary text to exist within the text as an independent and…

Analogies between the reading and writing processes can be drawn from a method of teaching literature that is based on Louise Rosenblatt's transactional theory of reading. The prime responsibilities of teachers of literature are to allow students the right to experience the text for themselves, arriving at their own interpretations, and to make…

Discusses "symbologizing schemata," the advanced processes by which readers comprehend narratives and the symbols embedded in literary works. Notes how teachers can apply knowledge of symbologizing schemata to instruction in literature classes. (RL)

In an effort to learn more about the teaching of reading and interpretation of poetry, a structured experiment was devised whereby college English majors used a combination of reading, writing and discussion to study James Wright's poem "A Blessing." The primary aim was to involve the students emotionally in a poem. Students were…

Provides a background of response theory, two Canadian perspectives on response theory, a description of transactional response theory and response-centered curriculum, a discussion of the concepts of participant and spectator roles in literature and of the idea of narration and storying as literature, and a discussion of analysis and criticism.…

Argues that when involving students in activities that require them to explore texts creatively, teachers should also make them inquire into their own reading processes--especially since the reading of literature helps the students to become aware of their own intellectual process if attention is focused on them reflexively. (HOD)

While each English department will establish its own set of assumptions appropriate for its objectives and programs, the new rhetoric can bring some coherence to the teaching of writing and literature by providing students with reliable strategies for reading literature as well as writing. In teaching literature teachers need to demonstrate the…