Reframing Rosenblatt: Teaching Reading Theory to Seventh-Grade Students

• In Event: Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: Teacher Research: Critical Literacy Across the Grades

Abstract

In this practitioner research study, urban seventh grade students in an English Language Arts class were immersed in an interactive, conversationally-focused curriculum and taught reading theories. Through private and whole class discussions, students began to understand their own and others’ reading preferences, skills and abilities. Five students representing the ethnic and academic diversity of the classroom were selected for close analysis. It was found that by the end of the seventh grade, all five students understood themselves as very different kinds of readers, and became authorities of their own reading styles, preferences, needs and abilities.

Author

• Mary Beth Schaefer, Saint John's University