Literacy is now an essential part of teaching for Indonesian teachers. This qualitative case study reports on three Indonesian teachers as they integrate the use of children's literature into their literacy instruction. For 4 months, the teachers' efforts to use children's literature were documented through multiple sources such as focus group…

This article explores the potential of narrative interest for secondary literature education. Narrative is a purposeful construction which is organised with the intent of having effects on readers. For rhetorical narratologists, narrative is driven by the production of narrative gaps -- suspense, curiosity, and surprise -- which in turn drive…

Purpose: Dialogic reading (DR) is an evidence-based method for reading with young children that is associated with improvements in children's oral language skills. There is, however, a lack of consensus on (a) how to train educators to deliver the intervention and (b) methods for assessing implementation fidelity. We designed this study to provide…

In this conceptual essay, I ask, what might happen when educators default to unexamined habits in their classrooms? How might we be ignoring the more creative pedagogical options, not for lack of good intentions but simply out of routine and tradition? I utilize John Dewey's ('Habit.' In "John Dewey: The Later works," edited by J. A.…

This article explores the potential for engaging 7 and 8-year-old school pupils in performative literature interpretation through process drama. Inspired by new materialism and affect theory, we focus on how literature interpretations come into being in dramatic fiction, and on how these becoming interpretations merge with the classroom. The study…

Critical literacy requires that readers have both the ability and the deliberate inclination to think critically about texts of all types, meaningfully question their origin and purpose, and take action. Response to reading from a critical stance has typically been limited to discussion but has recently expanded to include other modes of response.…

This qualitative research investigated two preservice teachers' multimodal aesthetic reader responses to a wordless picture book in a literacy methods course. This study took up a sociocultural perspective that was informed by transactional reader response theory (Rosenblatt, 1978, 1986, 2013) and further supported by a pedagogy of…

This study considers the relative benefits for vocabulary learning of exposure to two types of texts--literary or nonliterary--used with two teaching approaches. These approaches were termed "functional and creative", respectively. In the former, learners' attention was drawn to factual information and linguistic features in order to…

This theoretical study examines the use of visual images as a bridge to and from printed literary texts for secondary-level and higher-education students. Elementary educators and literacy experts have long embraced the visual as a means through which pre-readers begin to "read" stories and for supporting young readers' comprehending…

This essay uses the metaphor of "savvy travelling" to discuss the limitations and problems associated with three current "best practice" approaches to the reading of literature in upper grade levels, particularly in the United States: close reading, response-based reading, and disciplinary literacy. A "savvy" approach…

This study aims to examine Black educators' experiences within cultural heritage institutions that are documenting topics that include the long arc of the American Civil Rights Movement. Black educators are powerful conduits of the African American story because they align with African American cultural heritage institution's goals to foster…

Building on sociocultural theories of literacy learning, in this article, we think at the intersection of reader response theory and multimodal literacies to examine how 13 preservice teachers in the course Teaching Social Sciences Through the Arts remediated responses to Francisco Jiménez's "The Circuit: Stories From the Life of a Migrant…

The purposes of this research were to: 1) study whether the use of literature activities improved EFL students' reading skills and critical thinking skills according to CEFR at C1 level; 2) investigate students' critical thinking skills in studying a literature course; and 3) examine students' attitudes towards the use of literature activities in…

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…