Provides information on how teachers can contribute additional encouragement, direction, and guidance for exploring and expanding intermediate-grade students' personal response to literature. Describes eight response options and offers guidelines. (PRA)

Notes that literature-based reading approaches are becoming increasingly popular in Canada as well as in other parts of North America. Reviews the rationale behind shared book experiences and literary clubs. Provides a variety of language-rich tasks to guide children as they respond to the stories they are reading. (RS)

Argues that literature classes will grow more interesting and more effective if educators coordinate two kinds of emphases: allowing for discovery and moving toward productivity. Offers four principles for developing assignments: respect the process; nourish the participants; aim for a variety of products; and reflect together on process,…

Provides a personal narrative of how one Shakespearean teacher-actor was "remade" through specific experiences. Claims that students must perform at least some Shakespeare in order to experience personal and social enrichment. (NH)

Aims to help teachers find a way to help students enjoy Shakespeare through the process of performance. Provides guidelines gained from personal experience for teachers presenting the plays with secondary students that include the following: (1) audience consideration, (2) actor-ownership of the performance, (3) staging limitations, and (4)…

A 3-year project used a responsive teaching strategy, which begins with students' responses, to influence 6 adolescent readers' responses to poetry. Although not poetry enthusiasts initially, students developed intellectual keenness for the subject. (SK)

Presents two episodes from the reading experience of children in a Year 3 classroom: (1) a guided reading lesson conducted by the teacher; and (2) a group of reading sessions conducted by the researcher. Suggests that where children are given the power to make meaning for themselves, they are more likely to learn to read critically than those who…

This article presents the theoretical underpinnings of critical literacy and related principles. It also provides ideas for creating environments to promote reading from a critical stance, teaching strategies, sample classroom applications, and annotated lists of theme-related texts. When engaging in critical literacy, readers move beyond…

As an English teacher who has been teaching nearly 10 years in a college of southern Taiwan, the presenter reports his successful experience on a course, titled "Selected Readings from American Literature." In this try-out study, the presenter adapts a multigenre-response model via which he encourages Taiwan college students to bravely…

In this article, the author describes how Eric Fox presents an interesting case for applying functional contextualism (FC) constructs and principles to learning and instruction. He draws several well-debated issues related to the instructional design and technology (IDT) field's shifting philosophical-epistemological roots and pedagogical…

We tested the effects of writer immersion and the responses emitted by a peer reader across four male middle school participants diagnosed with behavioral disorders. The participants were chosen for this study due to their high structural errors and inability to write functionally in order to affect the behavior of a reader. Writer immersion and…

Examines Louise Rosenblatt's theory of the reading transaction to aid teachers in the dilemma of either encouraging individual responses to literature or expecting literal comprehension of the material. Encourages teachers to look at their teaching purposes for any given text and to match questions and activities to those purposes. (SR)

Describes how reader response journals encourage students to interact with literary works. Presents 20 questions, based on David Bleich's response heuristic, which help guide students' responses. (MM)

Summarizes the history of, and theory and research in, reader response approaches to teaching literature. Proposes an instructional process employing response-based teaching. (MM)

Provides a theoretical and practical basis for using reader response theory in the classroom with noncanonical literature. (SRT)