Language Arts Volume 97, Number 4 (full issue)

Readers, Reading, and Responding

This issue includes discussions and lesson plans that focus on engaging children with reading. Also included are selections from the NCTE committee on 2019 Notable Children's Books in ELA.

Calls for Manuscripts

I Hear You: Teaching Social Justice in Interactive Read-Alouds

Ted Kesler, Meredith Mills, and Meaghan Reilly

The article provides teachers with explicit support for planning and implementing interactive read-aloud for social justice that is responsive to the needs of their own students. The authors present how to choose appropriate high-quality books and use a template for responsive planning with their children in mind. They share an implementation of an interactive read-aloud that demonstrates how responsive teaching builds exploratory talk to develop children’s co-construction of knowledge for the dialectic expression of reading the word and reading the world.

Revisiting Reader Response: Contemporary Nonfiction Children’s Literature as Remixes

Jennifer M. Graff and Courtney Shimek

Informed by Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading and new literacies, this article discusses how award-winning nonfiction children’s literature within the past decade can be considered literary remixes that, as processes and products situated within our digital and technology-rich cultures, invite readers to engage with texts in more agentive and participatory ways. Using literature exemplars and elementary classroom experiences, the article shares how readers’ responses to nonfiction can look and feel different when compared to more conventional responses to nonfiction.

Research & Policy: Reading and Responding to LGBTQ-Inclusive Children’s Literature in School Settings: Considering the State of Research on Inclusion

Karla J. Möller

Through a social justice lens, the author examines research on reading and response, both spontaneous and facilitated, to LGBTQ-inclusive children’s literature in elementary school settings.

Language Arts Lessons: Reading, Writing, and Performing Life Histories to Explore Complex Interactions between Life and Texts

Susan Browne and Marjorie Madden

This column looks at ways literary life histories invite students to interpret texts from experiential, cultural, social, and other stances and positionalities.

Children’s Literature Reviews: The 2019 Notable Children’s Books in the English Language Arts

Cynthia Alaniz, Jane Bean-Folkes, Elizabeth Bemiss, Sue Corbin, Jeanne Fain, S. Rebecca Leigh, and Jennifer Summerlin

The 2019 Notable Children’s Books, unique in language and/or style, encourage readers to discover quality texts that linger long after the pages have been read.

Perspectives on Practice: Emotion, Critical Literacy, and the Transformation of Signs: The Fundamentals of Language Arts

Cynthia Lewis

 Understanding how emotion circulates in classrooms and what emotion does to signs is central to teachers and researchers of critical literacy and literary response.