Literature instructors become frustrated as they read poorly written student essays. The problem is partly the students' lack of experience: they have not read a lot or written a lot. Literature classes can be more interesting and effective if teachers coordinate two kinds of emphases: allowing for discovery and moving toward productivity. In…

Many freshmen come to English courses thinking that they generally dislike poetry and that in particular they dislike writing critical essays about poetry. Two strategies which are effective in helping students overcome their own negative perceptions are to allow students to: (1) engage in transactional reader response; and (2) explore poetry…

Working from case studies of teachers and from the actual language used by teachers and students, this book provides a rationale for and a description of a response-centered approach to the teaching of literature in the secondary school. Embedded throughout the book are student activities. Each chapter gives suggested readings of related articles…

In an effort to effect significant change in teachers' knowledge understanding, and choice of instructional strategies for guiding the study of literature as art, a study explored the teaching and learning of critical/aesthetic response to literature among elementary school children. Subjects, 25 first graders and 39 fifth graders, were evaluated…

Originally developed as part of a project for the Department of Defense Schools (DoDDS) system, this learning package on appreciating literature is designed for teachers who wish to upgrade or expand their teaching skills on their own. The package includes an overview of the project; a comprehensive search of the ERIC database; a lecture giving an…

The current literary tradition observes a canon of hierarchies, a ranking of great writers and genres, that tends to exclude or downgrade women and lower caste males. The response of feminist scholars to this state of affairs falls into two general categories: the first is to find great women authors to fit into the canon on its own terms; the…

To examine the effect of structural factors on the development of story appreciation, a developmental model of story liking for suspense stories was tested by having second, fourth, and sixth grade children rate suspense stories on 10 affective scales. Specifically, the model predicted that (1) reader identification would increase with greater…

Reader-response journals were successfully employed in a "Reading Shakespeare" course for non-majors, making literary tradition accessible to students untrained in classical rhetoric. Students were encouraged to employ any combination of four approaches. First, students were invited to ask questions about the language, sequence of…

Offering activities for secondary school students and amateur creative writers, this book demonstrates how teachers can break out of "high culture" stereotypes that make students think poetry has no connection with real life. Part one discusses the essentials of poetry and the roles of poets from ancient oral cultures to the present. The…

Elements from literary, composition, and reader-response theory can be successfully combined in teaching an African-American literature class to college students of the dominant culture. Helping students to decode texts is of primary importance, best done by introducing students to the cultural codes used by minority writers to shape their themes.…

A study was conducted to write an ethnographic description of how the influences of the reader's culture and the culture depicted in a text are associated with the responses of first-semester college freshmen to a series of contemporary Appalachian short stories. Cultural backgrounds of six informants and the cultures depicted in six stories were…

One of the most effective means of achieving a successful program in reading is the use of the young adult novel to stimulate the adolescent's interest in free reading or even to instill an interest where there is none. A novel which provides pleasurable reading experiences with interesting material at the proper level (such as novels by Judy…

There appears to be a problem in the way students in introductory, nonmajor literature courses read poetry that affects the way they write about it. One widely accepted belief among students is that there is a hidden but identifiable meaning in the poem that they are supposed to discover. The problem with this strategy is that most students lack…

Throughout its history, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has addressed the question: How can literature be fully revealed to students at all educational levels? In answering this question, NCTE has (1) clarified the rationale and objectives for teaching literature, with a view to reconciling concepts of literature as both an…

Using a college course on William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" as a case study, this book presents an alternative approach to teaching poetry. Divided into seven sections with 19 chapters, the book describes how students can develop and exercise an historical imagination in the…