This paper considers whether societal changes are making space for some working-class boys to go against the grain and foster positive reader identities. Drawing on interviews with 30 Australian boys about their experiences at school, Nancy Fraser's social justice framework is used to explore their parity of participation as readers. Responses…

This single instrument case study illuminates the aesthetic transactions an adolescent male student constructs in response to an experimental Gothic studies reading unit implemented by his cooperating teacher over a sixth month period in his seventh grade ELA (English/ Language Arts) class. Ray is described as ''lazy' regarding academic reading…

The challenges associated with boys and reading are focused on such factors as society's lack of focus on literacy skills, parents failings to inspire reading in boys, and internal motivational factors rather than looking at the environments created for reading in and out of school. In this column, several ideas for helping boys develop a…

Research literature concerning gifted male readers relies primarily on more extensive bodies of work regarding gifted males and male readers. Studied as a whole, the two halves portray a worrisome state of affairs for gifted male readers, who lag behind their female counterparts in the same patterns found across the ability spectrum. This literacy…

Boys need books with which they can connect, books that reach out to them with characters that reflect themselves, books that feature people who speak and look and act like the people in their lives. Among the functions of literature in children's lives, two are particularly relevant: facilitating literacy skills and providing role models. The…

A major educational crisis has been transpiring among fourth and fifth grade boys over the last twenty years (Eliot, 2009; Whitmire, 2010). On average, fourth and fifth grade boys, regardless of racial background or socioeconomic class, are performing below girls, both academically in reading and writing. The Center on Educational Policy reports…

This article is about a book club for middle school boys. The idea of a book club for boys came from the author's concern about what he had been hearing and reading about boys falling behind in their reading abilities. The purpose of establishing the club was to discover from the boys themselves what could be done to support them in their reading.…

The nation's focus on the literacy skills of students--especially boys--has produced many notions of reform. School districts reorganized and changed curricula to meet the needs of struggling readers and writers. In New York City, where this author was teaching, "Balanced Literacy" (a reading and writing workshop) had been implemented in…

According to the 2004 National Assessment of Educational Progress, males who have made it through 12 years of school have significantly poorer reading skills than their female peers. In every age group, boys have been scoring lower than girls annually for more than three decades on U.S. Department of Education reading tests. The longer boys are in…

Administers the Qualitative Reading Inventory-II and the reading subtests of the Woodcock Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery-Revised to 34 fourth-grade males reading at or below the 25th percentile on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. Considers the different results obtained by each test. Discusses implications for placing poor readers in…

Based on research indicating successful readers have several common characteristics (student choice and availability of reading materials, time for reading, and time to talk about their reading), a study explored research findings about each characteristic and surveyed middle grade teachers' reading practices in the classroom. Seventh-grade…