Literacy educators, spurred by curricular standards requiring increased attention to reading nonfiction, are compelled to consider text-specific reading instruction. As research supports the connection between motivation and reading achievement, these mandates beg the question, "Are children equally motivated to read fiction and…

This paper is a re-examination of Louise Rosenblatt's seminal work of reader-response theory, The Reader, The Text, The Poem. I argue that poems are essentially social in nature and that they open up a space in which conversation and interpretation can take place. With Rosenblatt I argue that until a reader engages with a poem, bringing to it a…

Purpose: This paper encourages teachers and scholars of English Language Arts to engage deliberately with literary ambiguity. Design/methodology/approach: Through close attention to ambiguous moments in commonly taught texts, the essay argues that explicit attention to ambiguity can support four enduring goals in the field: fostering social…

An event-related potential experiment was conducted in order to investigate readers' response to violations in the hierarchical structure of functional categories in Japanese, an agglutinative language where functional heads like Negation (Neg) as well as Tense (Tns) are realized as suffixes. A left-lateralized negativity followed by a P600 was…

This article seeks to complicate the understanding of Bishop's (1990) metaphor of mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors, with particular emphasis on sliding glass doors and the emotional connections needed for readers to move through them. The authors begin by examining the importance of the reader and the characters he or she meets. Next, the…

Discourses of reading for pleasure have seldom addressed the multiple and complex digital media practices of children and young people or the changing nature of literacy. This article explores the affective encounters that are generated in the relations between readers, digital texts and things by applying Bennett's notion of enchantment. Using…

Purpose: Using a discourse analytic approach, the purpose of this paper is to examine how genre impacts white readers when reading about historic acts of racial violence. Specifically, this study explores one white high school student's stance-taking as she read an informational text and an eyewitness narrative about the Tulsa Race Massacre.…

Perhaps no factor has a greater influence on children's literacy learning than exposure to engaging, authentic, culturally relevant texts. This concise practitioner resource and course text helps K--8 teachers make informed choices about using children's literature in their classrooms, from selecting high-quality texts to planning instruction and…

Fifth graders interpreted the book "Doll Bones" by Holly Black through visual representations from the beginning to the end of the book. Each visual representation was analyzed to determine how students responded. Most frequently, they moved to inferential ways of understanding. Students often visually interpreted emotional plot elements…

The present study examines individuals' thinking during and after reading controversial historical accounts and the possible contribution of epistemic beliefs, emotions, and prior-knowledge in this context. Young adults (n = 39) were asked to read two accounts about a recent war in their country, an own-side account -- from a historian of their…

The author compared preschool teachers' and students' responses to informational texts (nonfiction) as they read together in small groups. Drawing from reader response theory, similarities and differences were found in teachers' and students' reading behaviors. Teachers took a predominantly efferent stance toward the texts because the teachers'…

New nature writing has been gaining popularity in the English-speaking world. Using participant observation of a book group, this article finds that reading such ecological writing can facilitate reader shifts in perceptions and the valuing of non-human organisms and the more-than-human world. Shifts are enabled when readers experience reading as…

Picturebooks are defined by the interaction of words and pictures to convey narrative (Bader, 1976; Kiefer, 1995; Sipe, 2011), referred to in this study as the word-picture relationship. This dissertation study extends on the work of others who investigated young children's responses to picturebooks (e.g., Arizpe & Styles, 2016; Sipe, 2008a;…

Students in a college literature class have been formed by conflicting approaches to literary pedagogy. The Common Core Standards deemphasize formative reading in favor of close reading, post-reading analysis of literary elements. A counter-movement, with its own network of publications and workshops, emphasizes formative reading, emotional…

I examine the ways in which reading in the classroom is a social practice and how that social practice can produce nuanced student texts that reflect a rich understanding of what has been read. In doing so, I also consider how the reading environment allows us to manipulate and embody texts in ways that allow for a more detailed understanding than…