Reading across texts: perceptions and performance of early adolescent readers

<p>Learning Media have introduced an anthology series that draws on writing previously published in the School Journals with the addition, lately, of commissioned work. The series is designed to meet the new curriculum objectives for English, social studies and science with less practised readers. A title in the series will typically contain narratives as well as personal accounts by experts, loosely related to a theme in the social studies or science curriculum. A survey of how the titles were being used indicated that teachers were treating the contents of the anthologies as single texts and that the advantages of reading across texts related to a theme were not being realised. A study was therefore conducted with an intermediate school class in order to establish an activity cycle that would exploit the potential of anthologies as a resource for reading-to-write from multiple sources. The experience gained from the study suggests that the cycle should contain instruction on transforming sources and this skill needs to be practised within the framework of a discourse synthesis task. In the study, the task appeared to be the driving force that determined what was read, what information was selected, the student's stance towards the information, and what guided the monitoring process. Reading proficiency did not appear to make a substantial difference to the way the task was interpreted nor in the way the task was accomplished tactically, suggesting that discourse synthesis is an issue of experience with the component skills.</p>

Reading across texts: perceptions and performance of early adolescent readers

<p>Learning Media have introduced an anthology series that draws on writing previously published in the School Journals with the addition, lately, of commissioned work. The series is designed to meet the new curriculum objectives for English, social studies and science with less practised readers. A title in the series will typically contain narratives as well as personal accounts by experts, loosely related to a theme in the social studies or science curriculum. A survey of how the titles were being used indicated that teachers were treating the contents of the anthologies as single texts and that the advantages of reading across texts related to a theme were not being realised. A study was therefore conducted with an intermediate school class in order to establish an activity cycle that would exploit the potential of anthologies as a resource for reading-to-write from multiple sources. The experience gained from the study suggests that the cycle should contain instruction on transforming sources and this skill needs to be practised within the framework of a discourse synthesis task. In the study, the task appeared to be the driving force that determined what was read, what information was selected, the student's stance towards the information, and what guided the monitoring process. Reading proficiency did not appear to make a substantial difference to the way the task was interpreted nor in the way the task was accomplished tactically, suggesting that discourse synthesis is an issue of experience with the component skills.</p>

An Artist and a Writer: YA Literature by Anna Höglund

This article highlights the interpictorality in two YA books by the Swedish writer and illustrator Anna Höglund, Om detta talar man endast med kaniner [This Is Something You Only Talk About with Rabbits] (2013) and Att vara jag [To Be Me] (2015). The analysis of the visual intertextuality between pieces of artwork by Peter Tillberg, Frida Kahlo, Lena Cronqvist, Richard Bergh and René Magritte and five pictures from Höglund’s books thematises school, body and identity. The discursive positioning in the artworks and in Höglund’s pictures directs the readers in their decoding of Höglund’s text, offers possibilities in their interpretations and challenges the adolescent readers to make connections across different formats, such as text and image, and between different images.

Gifted Adolescent Readers’ Perceptions of How Teachers Should (or Should Not) Listen During Dialogic Discourse

Effective listening is essential when teachers facilitate instructional classroom discussions. While the intersection between teacher listening and how students engage in discussions has received a wealth of research attention from other fields, this important phenomenon continues to be underresearched in the gifted and literacy education fields. To deepen our understanding of the phenomenon of teacher listening from students’ perspectives, we conducted an in-depth focus group study with middle school gifted students from five schools in a Southeastern state in the United States. Findings of our data analysis revealed four key interrelated themes: (a) teachers as active listeners, (b) teacher character traits, (c) student feelings and behaviors, and (d) listening as a pedagogical tool. Of significance, this study revealed students’ perspectives of how gifted education teachers should listen and that their listening influences students’ sense of connectedness and motivation for learning. Implications for professional learning and recommendations for future research are discussed.

Analysis of Class-as-Race and Gender Ideology in the US Young Adult Sports Novel Racing Savannah (2013)

Equine fiction is an established genre in the English juvenile literary canon. Current works in the field appeal to adolescent readers thanks to their interface between classic motifs of vintage and contemporary forms of equine narratives. Performing a close reading of selected passages in Miranda Kenneally’s Racing Savannah (2013), this paper acknowledges how this novel is a revitalization and a challenge to this pattern. Savannah, who is more gifted than her companions, is subordinate to the decisions of the junior of the household where she works. Jack Goodwin, the protagonist’s romantic lead, educated in a neocolonialist background of male jockeying, becomes Savannah’s marker of difference according to her sex and lower socioeconomic status, which lay at the root of her later racialization despite her being a white character. My analysis attempts to expose how these difficulties encountered by the protagonist to become a professional jockey articulate past and present constraints of the horse-racing ladder.

A Synthesis of the Sustainability of Remedial Reading Intervention Effects for Struggling Adolescent Readers

A majority of reading-related intervention studies aiming to remediate struggling readers’ reading outcomes assess student performance immediately following the conclusion of an intervention to determine intervention effects. Few studies collect follow-up data to measure the long-term sustainability of treatment effects. Hence, the aim of the current synthesis was to examine follow-up intervention effects of reading interventions involving adolescent struggling readers in Grades 6 to 12. Our literature search yielded only 10 studies that reported follow-up data for intervention participants, which highlights the dearth of intervention research that examines sustainability of intervention effects. Of the 10 included studies, the weighted mean effect size for all reading outcome measures was gw = 0.78 at immediate posttest and gw = 0.27 at follow-up, in favor of treatment group students. Although the magnitude of difference between treatment and control groups diminished at follow-up time, a comparison of treatment group students’ immediate posttest and follow-up scores showed that students mostly maintained gains made during intervention at follow-up time points.