This study explores virtual, student-author interviews eighth-grade students led with Chris Crowe in response to his young adult novel "Mississippi Trial, 1955." The opportunity to interview the author motivated students to read the novel. Through their text-world development, students connected with the fictional and nonfictional…

The authors share findings from a recent study of teens who freely select to read texts typically marginalized by schools (dystopia, vampire, romance, horror, fantasy), revealing the distinct functional and psychological benefits of pleasure reading. The students who participated in the study that the authors report on were eighth graders who…

This article describes a theory of how culture enables literary interpretations of texts. We begin with a brief overview of the reader response field. From there, we introduce the theory and provide illustrative participant data examples. These data examples illustrate the four cultural positions middle grade students in our research assumed when…

During two multifaceted, classroom-based research projects, Grade 7 students had opportunities to develop their understanding of metafictive devices and art and design elements by reading a selection of picturebooks and graphic novels. The students also had the opportunity to apply their knowledge and create their own multimodal print texts. This…

Reader-response has become one of the most influential literary theories to inform the pedagogies of middle and secondary English classrooms. However, many English and literacy educators have begun to advocate for more critical and culturally responsive versions of reader-response pedagogies, arguing that teachers move beyond valuing students'…

This article describes an urban middle school community that took part in a yearlong literacy engagement--a whole-school read of a young adult novel. The authors, three researchers from a nearby university, documented the yearlong event and the effect it had on the school's academic and social spaces. Relying on the perspective that literacy is…

Each year junior high students around the country read S. E. Hinton's 50-year-old tale, "The Outsiders," about life as an adolescent, and devour its universal message of acceptance and stereotype as told through the vision of a teenage author. "The Outsiders" is so effective as a young adult novel because students immediately see the connection S.…

Recent reexaminations of adolescent literacy have expanded previous cognitive psychological models of reading to include views of the social and cultural aspects of literacy. The term critical literacy refers to approaches that focus on the social forces that influence the creation and interpretation of texts. When applied to the study of literary…