How can we help pupils learn to read historically? Gary Howells explores this question by explaining how he builds reading challenges into the course of his pupils' post-16 studies and by describing some of the tasks that pupils are set and the principles that underpin them. Howells argues that over time and through stepped and scaffolded tasks,…

In the first year of a pilot program, 18 New York City schools are digging into new ways to accomplish two objectives emphasized in the common-core standards: (1) engage students in increasingly complex texts as they move through school; and (2) help them conquer literacy skills specific to disciplines such as history and science. Spearheaded by…

In this article, the author shares her experience during the final semester of Year 11 Theatre Studies when she performed a monologue about Hermione from "The Winter's Tale". This experience was extremely significant to her because it nearly made her lose faith in one of the most important parts of her life, drama. She believes this…

The major research question was: How do pictures and texts function in developing literary elements in picturebooks for younger readers and picturebooks for older readers? We examined 30 picturebooks for younger readers and 30 picturebooks for older readers to determine how pictures and text work to develop plot, character, setting, and mood.…

This article examines the reciprocity between children's literature and educational ideals in Dutch rewritings of international literary classics published for children between 1850 and 1950. It analyses the assumed pedagogical power of rewritings of international literary classics for children from the perspective of three theoretical concepts:…

In 2 previous studies (O'Brien, Rizzella, Albrecht, & Halleran, 1998; Zwaan & Madden, 2004), researchers have provided conflicting accounts about whether outdated information continues to influence the comprehension of subsequent text. The current set of experiments was designed to explore further the impact of outdated information on…

Recent findings (Keysar, 1994; Weingartner & Klin, 2005) have shown that readers are not always accurate at taking a story character's perspective. When readers evaluated a character's understanding of a written message, they mistakenly took into account information that was inaccessible to that character. The results from the three experiments…

O'Connor, an author of realistic fiction for children, shares her attempts to strike a balance between carefree, uncensored, authentic, realistic writing and age-appropriate writing. Of course, complicating that balancing act is the fact that what seems age-appropriate to her might not seem so to everyone. O'Connor suggests that while it may be…

This author has been a "reader girl" since the third grade, when she first read "Trumpet of the Swan" on her own. Fourth grade brought C. S. Lewis, Lloyd Alexander, and Joan Aiken. Fifth grade was Cynthia Voigt, Anne McCaffrey, and Robin McKinley. And so it continued with Ellen Raskin, Patricia McKillip, and L. M. Montgomery, a veritable battalion…

In this review of literature we examine empirical research of individual differences in younger readers' knowledge and use of expository text structures. The goal of this review is to explore the influence of reader and text characteristics in order to better understand the instructional needs of elementary school readers. First we review research…

The authors, a ninth-grade teacher in a Special Education English class (Cheryl) and a teacher educator (Bucky), know of each other's work through a mutual interest in graphic novels. This article describes what happened in Cheryl's class when her students read "American Born Chinese" and discussed that text in a blog with its author, Gene Luen…

Storyboards deliver a narrative through discrete visual representations. The purpose of the storyboards was always to "scaffold" the final product and students were free to add, delete, or adapt those images that were most helpful to their project. The storyboards served as a brainstorming activity, much like a prewriting exercise for a written…

Critical thinking skills are crucial for both academic and everyday life. This paper presents the author's Text Analysis Matrix (TAM), a model for developing skills for the critical examination of texts. The TAM guidelines involve finding and clarifying the main claims of a text, discovering and assessing arguments, uncovering the implications for…

This exploratory study describes the instructional strategies and related activities a Grade 1 teacher and I used to promote engagements with informational texts in one rural Jamaican primary school. Some of the instructional strategies and activities were bridging connections from the known to the unknown, reading aloud to increase content…

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between children's use of reading strategies and language cues while reading and their comprehension after reading two texts: "Cherries and Cherry Pits" (Williams, 1986) and "There's Something in My Attic" (Mayer, 1988). The data were drawn from a larger study of the…