Through looking critically at the underpinnings of "story mapping, a teacher uncovers a contradiction between the author's definition of reading as a constructive process and the reductionist nature of story mapping, which she shows inhibits students' potential to explore a diverse range of personal responses by promoting comprehension over response, uniformity over diversity, and control over freedom.

Reading internalizes every aspect of good writing—if you're reading good writing, which most middle school textbooks aren't. Here are criteria and suggestions for good content-area articles and trade nonfiction books.

This article describes different ways that students can report on books they have read other than the traditional "book report."

Explores (from the point of view of the writer, a children's author) one aspect of learning about language that is present in the picture books he writes: the relation between sound and sense.

In this issue you will read about elementary children who are introduced to genre primarily through their teachers reading aloud. The children are invited to become inquirers who continue to explore books as they meet in small groups to write and read on their own—from fantasy to African folktales to poetry.

Offers 50 diverse suggestions intended to offer students new ways to think about a piece of literature, new directions to explore, and ways to respond with greater depth to the books they read.

This article discusses the efforts of a fifth-grade teacher and a visiting poet to rekindle students' sense of poetic passion and pleasure and describes how the authors introduced students to poems for two voices.

This study examines the writing practices taken on and negotiated by multilingual class members within two multiage elementary classrooms.

Jago offers a review of Freytag's Pyramid and an example of how work with the concept of plot structure positively affected student understanding and writing.

High school teacher Jerome Evans makes popular culture an integral part of his courses. Through analyzing themes in song lyrics, rhetorical devices in essays and advertisements, and psychology in contemporary film, students improve their skills in critical thinking and writing.

Using texts that first meet the reading "levels" of middle school students, then offering increasingly challenging books, teachers can group students at all levels using multiple texts. Strategy logs and conferences are two of the successful tools teachers use to increase comprehension as well as critical reading skills.

Using children's picture books, Deborah Dean provided frameworks for student research papers that avoided the pitfalls leading to voiceless and encyclopedic writing. Research guide sheets; class analysis of text organization, sentence variety, stylistic choices; and peer review all contribute to interesting final papers.

This article summarizes and explicates research on 272 twelfth-grade students' reading autobiographies. Cope quotes from some noteworthy comments and makes some suggestions on how teachers and schools might do a better job of teaching literature.

Tom Romano leads students to allow themselves creative freedom while developing the patience to hone that first rush into a tight and effective piece of writing with voice.

Describes a four- to six-week project for high school sophomores in which students create pamphlets and in the process learn basic research skills and practice several elements of the research paper.

"Research Matters" provides teachers with review and application of research that illuminates the daily concerns and activities of English language arts teachers and classrooms.

Argues that elementary language-arts teachers should expand their definition of "text" to include film, a valuable instructional material. Notes that today's elementary students come to class with a great deal of knowledge about films--prior experiences which teachers can tap into. Discusses the application to film of reader-response theories.

Methods such as the circle poem, the "poetic interview," the found poem, and the poetic field trip are just some used by the author to create an atmosphere of mutual support and enable students to initiate "imaginative possibilities."

Describes ways short story collections can be integrated into the English curriculum, including a short story fair, a short story hunt, using single short stories to extend a unit, using a short story by itself, using a collection as a whole, and using short stories as part of a focus on writing. Offers a list of short story resources.