Language Arts - Volume 81, Issue 3, 2004

In a time when fantasy is at the height of its popularity, two 4th grade teachers discuss how they tapped into its literacy possibilities. In this article the authors explain how they moved their students from reading the genre simply for entertainment’s sake to exploring its more complex characteristics and ideas.The article provides an overview of a reading genre study in fantasy which incorporates independent reading, book clubs, read alouds, artwork and higher level thinking skills for all levels of readers.

This article presents findings from a collaborative school–university project in which third–grade children in a California public school classroom created ongoing email dialogues with adult writers in the Midwest throughout a school year. Although one of the adult writers focused on curricular topics, her two groups of epals established a counterscript through the genre of riddles. This use of genre enabled the "riddlers" in this project to effectively oppose the curricular discourse initiated by the adult writer.

In the article Multigenre Research: The Power of Choice and Interpretation, the authors give an overview of multigenre research and then describe how Camille’s university preservice teachers collaborate with Laurie’s fifth graders to write multigenre papers. They explain a systematic process that helps students select meaningful topics. Then they guide readers through a precedure called the FQI. This helps students to organize facts from multiple sources, to generate questions that that they would like to answer, and to brainstorm genres they might choose to write in their multigenre papers. The article concludes with a summary of the ways that this collaborative multigenre project helps both the university preservice teachers and the fifth graders.

In this article the authors analyze a child’s reading and retelling of a "complex text" that contains multiple story threads and genres to demonstrate how the reader deals with the text’s complexity as he reads. The authors discuss how struggling readers comprehend complex texts that are whole, rich and meaningful.