Informed by Bakhtin's theorization of voice as well as cross-disciplinary studies of scaling, the authors explore how a group of young filmmakers rendered one focal immigrant student's familial history by centering speakers addressing the topic of immigration from multiple levels, thereby connecting multiple social and spatiotemporal contexts in their multimodal storytelling to illustrate the costs of dehumanizing policies. In this case study, drawing from classroom observations, student work, and interviews with both students and teachers, the authors also highlight the importance of teacher agency in creating opportunities for refugee-background students to interactively engage in the language arts classroom. Drawing from interviews, observations, and analysis of student writing, the authors construct a detailed case study of how one student writer negotiated her stance toward the discourse of literary analysis based on her own writerly identity as a creative writer, illuminating the importance of critically attending to the ideological implications of teaching discipline-specific writing.

The discourse of literary analysis is dynamic and ideological, shifting as writers navigate conventions and practices to meet their rhetorical purposes in particular contexts. While scholars have engaged ideological analyses of students learning to write literary analysis essays in university contexts, few studies have documented student writers’ experiences of disciplinary enculturation in secondary English language arts classrooms. In this case study, we address this absence by using the concept of stance to examine how the identity of one student—Katarina—informed her interactions with the discourse of literary analysis as it was understood and instantiated by her teacher. In our analysis of essay drafts, field notes, artifacts, and interview transcripts, we found that the convergence of Katarina’s identity as a creative and emotional person and writer with the possibilities for selfhood afforded to her in this context contributed to her stance toward the discourse. We examine points of tension across two of Katarina’s essays that illuminate her ideological struggles as she navigated the discourse of her classroom. Our findings point to the utility of stance as a conceptual tool for researchers and educators to take a critical perspective on students’ writing processes in the context of the ideologically laden, authoritative demands of secondary classrooms.

While English literature once occupied a central position in national curricula, enrollment in the subject has undergone a continuing decline in English-speaking countries such as the United States and United Kingdom. Its marginal position may also be observed in formerly colonized countries such as Singapore, where the subject was introduced, appropriated, and reconstructed. My aim,in this paper, is to propose a reenvisioning of literature education premised on the principles of ethical cosmopolitanism. In the first part of the paper, I describe ethical cosmopolitanism by distinguishing it from strategic cosmopolitanism, which has more recently emerged in response to the pressures of economic globalization, leading to the economization of education. In the second part of the paper, I show how the principles of strategic cosmopolitanism have directed the national literature curriculum in Singapore through my analysis of the national syllabus and high-stakes examination papers from 1990 to the present. This leads to the third part of the paper, in which I use a case study of four literature teachers in Singapore secondary schools to characterize the ethical cosmopolitan pedagogies they employ to circumvent nation-centric, economic pressures of strategic cosmopolitanism operating at the national level. More importantly, I discuss how such pedagogies have the potential to foster a hospitable imagination, which constitutes the strongest defense one can give to literature education in the context of an increasingly culturally complex,connected, and contested global sphere.

This article discusses findings from a three-year ethnographic study of an ethnic studies course called Native American literature, which began during the passing of legislation that banned the teaching of ethnic studies in Arizona’s public and charter schools. The data analyzed here explore the ways students use silence as a form of critical literacy “or critical silent literacies” in response to racial microaggressions enacted by their peers, their teachers, or a combination of both. This framing of silence questions common assumptions that Native American students aresilent because of their biological, inherent, and/or cultural “traits” Challenging such assumptions, Native American students in this study reveal that as they attempt to voice their ideas, they are repeatedly silenced because their knowledges counter the dominant settler knowledges taught in public schools. As a result, they discuss how their silence has been used over time as a resistancestrategy to shield themselves, their identities, and their family and community knowledges from dominant, monocultural knowledges with which they did not agree.

Literacy research has not yet revealed how bilingual learners develop coherent and robust theories of language. Translation, however, provides emergent bilinguals (EL students) with opportunities to develop metalinguistic awareness, which can lead to a more complete conceptual framework for thinking about language and literacy. This preliminary research study sought to formulate an instructional approach (TRANSLATE: Teaching Reading and New Strategic Language Approaches to English learners) focused on using translation to ultimately improve ELL students’ reading comprehension. Using design research methods and qualitative analytical techniques, researchers asked middle school students described as struggling readers to work collaboratively and use various strategies to translate key excerpts from their required English literature curriculum into Spanish. Analysis of students’ statements, decision making, and interaction indicated that students’ conceptual understandings about language played an important role in their learning. Students reflected on the nature of vocabulary, syntax, and the ways that different languages communicate ideas. These findings extend conversations in literacy studies concerning the unique affordances of bilingualism to increase metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness, known contributors to higher levels of reading comprehension.

At universities, scholars in English studies manage what Gieryn (1999) called disciplinary boundary work (the rhetorical making and policing of boundaries that construct the discipline and its institutional formations as different from other disciplines and social formations) through categorical contrasts, including: literary criticism vs. writing studies/rhetoric; scholarship vs. creative writing; quantitative vs. qualitative research; university vs. K–12 schooling; university vs. workplace; and, of course, that most basic border of disciplinarity”disciplinary knowledge vs. everyday belief and culture. The two research reports in this issue of RTE both address college-level work in the field and both highlight interesting ways in which current theoretical and methodological developments are putting pressure on disciplinary boundaries in English studies.

The ethics and efficacy of explicitly teaching disciplinary discourse conventions to undergraduate students has been hotly debated. This quasi-experimental study seeks to contribute to these debates by focusing on the conventional special topoi of literary analysis”conventions that previous Writing in the Disciplines (WID) research indicates are customarily tacitly imparted to literature students. We compare student writing and questionnaires from seven sections of Writing about Literature providing explicit instruction in these disciplinary conventions to those from nine sections taught using traditional methods. We examine whether explicit instruction in disciplinary conventions helps students produce rhetorically effective discourse, whether English professors prefer student discourse that uses these conventions, and whether explicit instruction in disciplinary conventions hampers student expression, enjoyment, and engagement. Five English professors who rated the student essays gave higher ratings to essays that engaged the special topoi of their discipline. Furthermore, they significantly preferred the essays written by students who had received explicit instruction in these topoi. Meanwhile, students who received explicit instruction in the special topoi of literary analysis indicated comparable, often higher levels, of engagement, enjoyment, and perceived opportunities for self-expression to those students who experienced the course’s traditional pedagogy. These findings suggest several implications for WID instruction and research relating to student and faculty professionalization in higher education.

This article employs the concept of intersubjectivity to analyze developments in and discrepancies between students’ understandings of criteria for effective writing and the criteria of their teacher. It reports on a study that employed qualitative methods of interview and classroom observation in conjunction with analysis of students’ writing and the teacher’s feedback on their writing to explore the struggles of students learning the “genre of power” (Lemke, 1988, p. 89) of the literary analysis essay. The greatest challenges for the students in this study occurred for those whose goals and expectations related to this high-stakes genre of writing were not based on the same taken-for-granted assumptions about context and purpose as were their teacher’s. The article concludes by discussing teachers’ professional responsibility to negotiate shared goals for literacy with their students.

So much has been made over the crisis in English literature as field, as corpus, and as canon in recent years, that some of it undoubtedly has spilled over into English education. This has been the case in predominantly English-speaking Anglo-American and Commonwealth nations, as well as in those postcolonial states where English remains the medium of instruction and lingua franca of economic and cultural elites. Yet to attribute the pressures for change in pedagogic practice to academic paradigm shift per se would prop up the shaky axiom that English education is forever caught in some kind of perverse evolutionary time-lag, parasitic of university literary studies. I, too, believe that English education has reached a crucial moment in its history, but that this moment is contingent upon the changing demographics, cultural knowledges, and practices of economic globalization.

Quantitative analyses using CLASS 3.0 software and qualitative discourse analyses were conducted of the instructional and institutional effects of tracking in high- and low-track American literature classes taught by the same teacher, a participant in a national study of the effects of dialogic classroom discourse patterns on student achievement. The quantitative analyses of class activities and discourse patterns revealed somewhat different amounts and kinds of dialogic discourse in the two classes, but could not account for much of the difference in achievement between the two groups. A more detailed qualitative analysis of teacher interviews and classroom discourse, using discourse analysis to look at both how the classroom discourse positioned students vis-à-vis course content, and how students in the two tracks were characterized by the teacher, showed how instruction was influenced by the teacher’s cultural models of students’ institutional identities. The teacher’s identification with the high-track students aided her in enacting a curriculum that was more academically challenging and more coherent, both intertextually and culturally. These analyses suggest that institutional and instructional effects of tracking are inextricably interwoven where the teacher’s conceptions of students’ needs and abilities constrain the level of instruction and the coherence of the curriculum.

Describes the role of class discussion and a teacher’s particular discourse moves in the development of an inclusive learning culture in a high school English literature course with a rigorous academic curriculum. Focuses on how the teacher transformed previously tracked gifted and talented and general students’ understandings of what counted as being a reader while negotiating collaboration.

Offers a 30-year retrospective on the evolution of a researcher and of the field of English teaching. Discusses the tradition of scholarship that seeks to ground its approaches to teaching and learning in the best of their understandings of language use and language learning, drawing broadly on rhetoric, linguistics, sociology, literary criticism, cognitive science, and anthropology.

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Responses to one poem, Coleridge's Frost at Midnight, were studied using repertory grid technique. Twenty-one undergraduate stu- dents of English literature participated. A significant commonality in response was found within the grids, suggesting that for this group of readers a number of invariant features in the poem were determining response. The grids also brought to light individual differences in approach to the poem, which were explored during interviews with each student. Grid technique thus offers a method for mapping the boundary between individual and common features in literary response. A major tradition in literary studies has argued that a literary text offers one correct reading which all well-informed and sufficiently sensitive read- ers can be expected to discover. Recent arguments have undermined the authority of this approach: Fish (1980, p. 13), for instance, finds the author- ity of the text secondary to that of the interpretive community in determin- ing a given reader's response. One recent reader of Fish has taken him to imply that any reading of a literary work is acceptable (Eagleton, 1983, p. 85). Behind this debate lies an obvious but important theoretical point. To what extent does a given literary work constrain individual readings? Does a work's structure as a whole, for example, tend to determine the way in which its parts will be understood? Or is the work open at any point to influences originating outside the boundary of the text? Clearly, texts cannot be divorced from the language and culture in which they are written and read; but it might be postulated that a work of literature is distinguishable from other types of discourse by its possession of a structure of meaning internal to the text, and that this tends to direct the responses of all com- petent readers. To be specific: two or more elements within a text may be amenable to a variety of interpretations, according to the disposition or experience of indi- vidual readers; for example, I may enjoy Donne's attitude toward women, my neighbor may detest it. But if, despite such response differences, inter- pretations of particular elements in the poem show systematic relationships to each other across all readings, it may be argued that the text exhibits an internal structure that is determining response. In studying this question Groeben's (1980) distinction between text mean- ing and text sense is helpful. We may postulate that a given work has a

This essay explores parallels between new paradigms in the sciences, particularly quantum physics, chemistry, and biology, and new paradigms in reading and literary theory, particularly a socio-psycholinguistic, semiotic, transactional view of reading and a transactional view of the literary experience. Among the major parallels emphasized are the following concepts: reality is fundamentally an organic process; there is no sharp separation between observer and observed, reader and text, reader/text and context; the whole (universe, sentence, text) is not merely the sum of parts which can be separately identified; meaning is determined through transactions between observer and observed, reader and text, reader/text and context, and among textual elements on and across various levels. When a friend first introduced me to Fritjov Capra's The Turning Point (1982), I was intrigued by what Capra describes as the paradigm emerging in fields as diverse as physics and economics, psychology and medicine. Clearly, I thought, there are direct parallels between the paradigm Capra describes and that emerging in my own field, reading theory. Seeking to better understand such parallels, I delved into other recent books that describe for the non-scientist the paradigm emerging in the sciences. First among these was Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979), a fascinating introduction to quantum physics. More recent books include Wolfs Taking the Quantum Leap (1981), Jones's Physics as Metaphor (1982), Campbell's Grammatical Man (1982), Prigogine and Stengers' Order Out of Chaos (1984), Comfort's Reality and Empathy (1984), and Briggs and Peat's Looking Glass Universe (1984). Each of these in some way contributes to an understanding of the paradigm emerging in the sciences. In the following essay, I draw from books such as these some key concepts that seem to be emerging, or rather re-emerging, from various scientific disciplines, and trace parallels between these and similar concepts that have been re-emerging in reading theory and in literary theory. This work was supported by a Fellowship from the Faculty Research and Creative Activities Fund, Western Michigan University. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 19, No. 3, October 1985

The principal purpose of this study was to determine the low inference constituents of literary response. Data were obtained from 166 college undergraduates enrolled in nine introductory literature courses. A stimulus condition consisting of six dissimilar short stories and poems was devised. After reading each literary work, subjects were asked to complete a modified version of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement's Response Preference Measure. To determine empirically the constituents of literary response, subjects' ratings for each item for all six forms of the Response Preference Measure were jointly subjected to the principal axis method of common factor analysis. Subsequent to varimax rotation, the following four factors were interpreted and labeled: personal statement, descriptive response, interpretive response, and evaluative response.

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Two years later Stanley Edgar Hyman roundly voiced the wish for an ideal integration of all modern critical methods into one super method (Hyman, 1955) [p. 388]. Near the end of the next decade, in 1968, a pamphlet appeared under the sponsorship of the NCTE Committee on Research, Alan G. Purves's Elements of Writing about a Literary Work: A Study of Response to Literature. This was a schema which organized statements respondents made about literary works into four main categories:

Abstract not available

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