To promote independent reading in middle school, teachers must understand why adolescents choose to read or not read a specific book. Yet, there is limited research on the factors that students consider when evaluating books that teachers have introduced them to in class. This study aimed to describe factors that 43 Grade 7 and 8 students noted as…

Shannon Hale, Dean Hale, and Nathan Hale's graphic novel set "Rapunzel's Revenge" (2008) and "Calamity Jack" (2010) features fractured fairy tales that take up the issue of 'the damsel in distress,' questioning and complicating traditional gender roles in fairy tales. Throughout both graphic novels Rapunzel's character…

Although most of the writing in high school English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms is about literature and although there have been incessant calls for changing the practices of teaching and learning literature, only meager amounts of research have been conducted in these interrelated domains of the field. Accordingly, this dissertation seeks to…

This paper explores how students, as multimodal storytellers, can weave powerful narratives blending modes, genres, artefacts and literary conventions to represent the real and imagined in their lives. Part of a larger ethnographic case study of student writing in a middle years class for immigrant students learning English as an additional…

This article discusses a reading instruction applicable to widely diverse classrooms, because it weaves together dynamic strands from three approaches to teaching reading: literature circle method, reciprocal teaching, and modern literary theories. The author presents three stages to achieve reading success: (1) applying the key features of…