An instrument was developed and used with grade 11 students and university teacher education students (intending English teachers) in British Columbia to explore their beliefs about appropriate ways to interpret segments of Shakespeare's "Macbeth." This is the second is a series of instruments designed to explore students' and teachers'…

A five-step method of conflict analysis can help students generate accurate and complex theme statements about literature without teacher intervention. The conflict analysis involves (1) identifying the characters who are in conflict as a series of pairs and determining if the protagonist has an inner conflict; (2) determining the major conflict,…

Concerned with redefining instructional theory related to the teaching and learning processes in literature, this paper concentrates on articulating principles underlying literature instruction that can be taught in methods courses and that can become the framework that teachers internalize and use to make daily decisions about their teaching and…

To investigate the rhetorical relations between oral and written texts in adolescents' academic discourse, a study examined oral and written language samples of three high school juniors in a San Francisco area middle class suburban community (two males and one female) participating in an English literature class. Discourse analytic techniques…

In an eleventh-grade unit, students studied and practiced the art of storytelling and then went into elementary classrooms to tell stories to first-grade and second-grade children. Students prepared for the storytelling sessions by reading books on storytelling techniques, inviting a local storyteller to class and then videotaping and studying her…

If young readers (adolescents) are introduced to a range of story structures and less structured texts (or "deviant narratives"), it may encourage the development of more diverse and accommodating schemata and the capacity to make inferences about the link between discourse units. It is, after all, a basic principle of recent narrative…