A key instructional goal of English language arts instruction is teaching students to read and interpret complex literary texts. This report reviews the literature on the development and pedagogy of literary analysis skills. It analyzes literary analysis skills as a "key practice," a bundle of disciplinary skills and strategies that form…

Recent research shows that reading comprehension relies heavily on prior knowledge. Far more than generic "reading skills" like drawing inferences, making predictions, and knowing the function of subheads, how well students learn from a nonfiction text depends on their background knowledge of the text's subject matter. And in a cyclical…

This article describes elaboration in "literary letters" (Atwell, 1984, 1987) written by developmental reading students. Nineteen community college students received instruction in "elaborative thought patterns," or types of elaboration, to improve the quality of their responses to popular fiction. This instruction was part of…

Gustavson (Gustavson, L., "Journal of Children's Literature," 2000, 26(1), 16) used the award-winning novel "The View From Saturday" (Konigsburg, 1996) to investigate the discourses constructed by adolescent readers in after-school discussion groups. Participants in his study, instead of constructing interpretive discourse as Gustavson expected,…

Argues that the reader's active transformation and recreation of the text and both the content and function are best understood within the context of the personal style or identity the reader is shaping. (HOD)

Three significant changes have impacted the teaching of social studies to young adolescents in the past decade: (1) development of the curriculum standards for social studies by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS); (2) growth in the number of middle schools, which are premised on the integration of content; and (3) expansive use of…

Examines the nature of children's sense of theme in narratives as it develops over three age levels--kindergarten, second grade, and fourth grade--and investigates the role of literature in that development. Concludes that thematic identification is an early developmental strategy. (MM)

Student responses to Canadian realistic fiction for young adults were examined for four seventh grade girls and three seventh grade boys. Interview findings support the view that students should have a role in selecting what they read, should talk about reading informally, and should construct representations less influenced by teacher responses.…

If young readers (adolescents) are introduced to a range of story structures and less structured texts (or "deviant narratives"), it may encourage the development of more diverse and accommodating schemata and the capacity to make inferences about the link between discourse units. It is, after all, a basic principle of recent narrative…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 24 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the follwing: (1) the effects of junior great books programs on students' thinking and reading skills, (2) adolescent novels and the ideology of femininity, (3) the effect of…