Provides seven answers to the question: "What is the most persistent and troublesome problem you deal with in your English classroom?" Discusses student motivation, class size, critical thinking, self-esteem, and student interests. (PRA)

Reviews 10 new releases by new young authors of adolescent literature. (PRA)

Provides reviews of 11 historical novels with a U.S. setting that secondary school teachers recommend for adolescent readers. (PRA)

Argues that the role of English teachers has been expanded and "decentered" at the same time. Maintains that English teachers' practices should be based not only on the book of traditional literacy but also on ones combined with video, audio, and graphics whose text is linked by multiple paths. (SR)

Describes four ways (and several class activities) to make the meanings of media texts more visible to students while teaching the basics of critical theory. Analyzes (1) codes and conventions of language; (2) personal pleasure, understandings, and experience; (3) cultural, ideological meanings; and (4) commercial overtones and economic…

Presents several class activities for eighth and ninth graders that explore how different readings of a text are constructed, what values each reading supports, and whose interests it serves. Discusses multiple meanings, constructed readings, dominant and resistant readings, and reading character. (SR)

Describes the usefulness of helping students use varied critical stances (including feminism, new historicism, psychoanalytic criticism, and deconstruction) in the teaching of literature. Demonstrates with the "The Odyssey." (SR)

Argues that implementing feminist theory in the literature classroom must deal with issues of text, selection, and reading strategies. Discusses the relationship of the female reader to the literary canon (what is read) and pedagogical practice (how it is read). Presents Jean Rhys' novel "Wide Sargasso Sea" as a model of feminist text and…

Discusses responsive reading, resistant reading, and dialogical reading in literature instruction. Uses William Carlos Williams' short story, "The Use of Force," to illustrate these reading processes, in particular that of dialogical reading. (SR)

Discusses the usefulness of literary theory to instruction. Identifies, from a brief classroom transcript, a student's "misreadings," explains how theory helped understand their nature, and how it suggested an instructional strategy. (SR)

Describes "doing" literary criticism with secondary students, illustrated with S. E. Hinton's novel "The Outsiders." Discusses evaluating a book in terms of how well it represents the reader's life experience, the author's desired response, and as an expression of the author. Discusses evaluating other criticisms of the book. (SR)

Presents the first part of a six-part series reporting on a research project to investigate how students make sense of a text, what disempowers meaning making, what empowers meaning making, how readings might be meaningfully assessed, and how readers might be empowered in classrooms. Invites readers to join in the investigation. (SR)

Asserts that literary criticism and scholarly analyses provide a broad and enriching resource with which to inform instruction and discussion in a pluralistic classroom. Offers examples of a postreading activity based on seven major interpretations of Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Presents follow-up and extension…

Offers an annotated list of 14 significant books in the field of critical theory and literature in the secondary classroom. (SR)

Discusses teaching elements of film art in a high-school literature classroom. Focuses on two aspects of film that are different from written literature: metonymy (a key device for analyzing meaning in photography) and the function of film in cultural mythology. (SR)