Reacting to incoherent English teaching in the 1930s, Percival Gurrey probed the psychological processes involved in literary appreciation. He sought ways of teaching poetry that avoided lifeless tasks such as labelling "poetic devices." Later, in the 1950s, he wrote about the processes involved in learning to write. At a time when…

College students need experiences in reading and reacting to good writing if they are to learn to read effectively. Observing and reacting is an important skill that encompasses many of the skills effective readers employ such as paraphrasing, understanding the structure of a piece of literature, noting the use of generalizations and specifics,…

Teachers read student papers with both eager and anxious expectancy about discourse they have caused but not written. Whatever the teachers may have said about what they will look for as they read, they still measure each paper against their ideas about appropriate performances in each of the categories of textual analysis. They are not reacting…

This journal contains the following articles pertaining to English instruction in rural schools: (1) "Different, To Be Sure" (Nathan James Weate) compares rural and urban students and finds rural students to have strong family cohesiveness, strong moral values, and diversified interests; (2) "An Elevating Experience" (Dorothy Trusock) describes a…

This paper reports action research that focuses on gender as a social influence on learning through literacies such as listening, speaking, reading and writing, and orality. Data were collected in three physics classes taught by two teachers, one male and one female, representing three levels of physics. Teachers and researchers worked together in…

Writing instruction reflects a growing appreciation of the value of talk. By implementing peer writing groups, teachers encourage students to give, seek, and react to oral feedback among themselves as they write, in addition to reacting to the teacher's traditional comments on finished papers. Collaboration in writing groups provides writers with…

Explores the reader response patterns and intergenerational dialogue produced by five high school/university student pairs reading and reacting to a young adult multicultural novel, Gary Soto's "Buried Onions." Concludes that participants offered multiple perspectives, maintained mutual respect for each other's interpretations, and revealed the…