This article discusses a reading instruction applicable to widely diverse classrooms, because it weaves together dynamic strands from three approaches to teaching reading: literature circle method, reciprocal teaching, and modern literary theories. The author presents three stages to achieve reading success: (1) applying the key features of literature circles; (2) using Reciprocal teaching as a dialogue and literary analysis technique that centers book talk around the use of four strategies: questioning, summarizing, clarifying, and predicting; and (3) using explicit teaching of modern literary theories (New Historicism, Reader Response, Feminism and Gender Studies, Marxist Literacy Theory, and Cultural Studies) with the goal that the theories would later be applied to the texts. The author concludes that through this approach, the students can focus on several levels at once: the textual level, looking for literary elements; on the personal level seeing connections in their own lives; and on a wider, societal level finding and articulating alternative and equally appropriate readings of texts. In this way teachers can address basic literacy skills, students' relations to texts and each other as readers, and students' relationships to the races, genders, ethnicities, classes, and cultures in the world. (Contains 1 figure.)