The purpose of this study was to consider the issue of "authentic engagement" with texts in the context of KS3 and KS4 classroom English teaching. This article describes an exemplar session on the poem "A Fine Romance" by Roger McGough designed to elicit authentic engagement and provoke personal responses, and reports on the…

This paper explores the application of texture and textual attractors within a cognitive stylistic pedagogy for English teachers. Texture, defined as the feeling of building and experiencing a fictional world, is here taken up as a facilitative way of thinking about how reading, language, experience and cognition operate in the classroom. On the…

This article draws on research into using reader-response theory as a way of thinking about teaching grammar and poetry in the English classroom. Framing my discussion around world-based models of reader-response such as Transactional Theory (Rosenblatt 1938, 1978) and Text World Theory (Gavins 2007; Werth 1999), I argue that this approach is…

The aim of this study is to review research on poetry reading pedagogy in secondary education from 1990 to 2015. Today there is little research on poetry teaching in Sweden and thus little guidance for secondary teachers. Therefore, this study thematically analyses peer-reviewed articles from English language international journals. Articles were…

This document presents the proceedings of the 25th Annual Research Forum held June 30, 2021, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Included are the following eighteen action research papers: (1) Using Modern Events to Teach United States History (Charles Ahern); (2) "We Are All ESL Teachers": Culturally and…

The proposals for the revised National Curriculum in English suggest limiting the pre-twentieth century poetry that GCSE pupils read to "representative Romantic poetry" (Department for Education [DFE], 2013, p. 4). This paper argues that poetry of the early modern period is challenging and enriching study for adolescent pupils and that…

Throughout adolescence, children begin to develop their life story: a coherent account of their experiences and selfhood. Although the nature of this development is still being uncovered, one promising direction for research is the examination of factors that could encourage life story development. Here the authors explore the idea that exposure…

To encourage creative thinking, high school teacher Kelly Courtney-Smith asked her students for creative responses to Hesse's novel, using a technique she learned from coauthor Michael Angelotti. Students painted or wrote poems interpreting their reading, then responded to the creations of their classmates. The students found that these…

This paper examines the debate about the English literature canon in schools. It evaluates the importance of the canon in a 21st-century curriculum and considers its relevance to adolescent readers saturated in early 21st-century culture who have disparate identities and diverse backgrounds. The implications for teaching and learning of the…