Purpose: Preservice English teachers are expected to use literary theories and criticism to read and respond to literary texts. Over the past century, two of the most common approaches to literary encounters in secondary schools have been New Criticism -- particularly the practice of close reading -- and Rosenblatt's transactional theory, both of…

Taking Carroll's "Jabberwocky" as emblematic of a text historically enjoyed by both children and adults, this article seeks to place the text in what Kristeva defines as the borderline between language and subjectivity to theorize a realm in which ambivalent texts emerge as such. The fact that children's literature remains largely…

While conventional critics seek the comic aspect of parody, modernist critics credit parody with questioning mainstream literary trends and subverting literary production. For instance, Mikhail Bakhtin believes in parody's power to create "a decrowning double" by turning the official worldview up-side-down. For experimental poets like…

Recent reforms to Initial Teacher Education in England are a continuation of a decades-long political project, aiming to change the whole social complex around teachers' professional education. But the most recent frameworks present some new inflections to the construction of learning, pedagogical relationships and difference. Positivist versions…

This study investigates the impact of cultural and politico-religious dominance on the practice of critical reading (CR) of texts by a group of Iranian postgraduate students in Australia. Four postgraduate students were interviewed individually four times (each time for reading one text) for critical understanding of two pairs of Persian texts,…

This two-part paper argues that metaphor in both English and Arabic is defined and classified in almost the same way with some slight, but far from insignificant, differences. Those differences along with the linguistic nature of implied metaphor can be attributed to the failure in translating that type of metaphor from Arabic into English as…

In Morocco, debates over English language instruction have marginalized poetry as a distinct literary genre. The shortage of poetry events arguably makes poetry teaching both daunting and intimidating. Besides fostering trust, memorization, and empathy, helping students develop a penchant for English language, as well as humanity, poetry, and…

Although Khayyam is one of the Persian poets whose school of thought and poems are studied the most, there is hardly a research in which his intellectual system is explained and made clear via a linguistic framework. In this paper one of the most debatable matters which is "Obligation" versus "Free Will" is dealt with by using…

What happens when teachers perceive a growing rift between their pedagogical practice and their students' lived experiences? How do teachers respond to the uncertainty that such a "relevance gap" can create? In a climate in which literacy research is often pressed to address the achievement gap and to contribute to a sense of certainty,…

The present study aimed to investigate the frequency of the use of two semantic adjustment strategies; namely, expansion and reduction, in the two English translations of book one of "Masnavi." For this purpose, 300 lines of "Masnavi" by Rumi (2014) along its two corresponding English translations by Nicholson (2004) and…

School examinations of student responses to literature often present poetry blind or "unseen", inviting decontextualised close reading consistent with the orientation-to-text associated with Practical Criticism (originating in the UK) and New Criticism (originating in the USA). The approach survives in the UK after curricular reforms and…

This study takes a fine-grained look at the inaugural implementation of a high-stakes teacher performance assessment (the edTPA) from multiple perspectives and chronicles how participants used the reading, writing, and discussion of poetry to cope with and sometimes critique the edTPA. Teacher researchers sought to understand multiple perspectives…

This conceptual article theorises the role of poetry in English classrooms from a multimodal perspective. It discusses the gap between the practices of poetry inside and outside South African schools, particularly where English is taught as an additional language (EAL). The former is shown to be monomodal and prescriptive, while the latter is…

This chapter investigates digital methods of signification in order to examine the impact of the digital medium on poetic expression. Traditional poetry criticism is problematised with reference to its suitability for application to online works in order to develop a comprehensive ePoetry rhetoric that explores not only what is being said, but…

The act of teaching is constituted by tensions between contradictory influences of national educational systems, teachers' professional/personal identity, cultural and social values. Qualitative research methods can explore this complex situation. Indeed, narrative methods have explored teachers' "life histories". This article provides a…