It has been recognized since the 1980s that literacy begins to develop a long time before formal schooling begins. In today's literate environment, children start learning to read much as they learn to speak, through playful print interactions with their parents, older siblings, or other adults, beginning in year one. A sharp debate about the best approach to developing early childhood literacy is now brewing between reading instruction experts, who tend to advocate direct instruction of skills, and preschool educators, who know that preschoolers learn best through play. This book provides a model for action that may help to settle the debate. Interactions that involve the printed word occur spontaneously between young children and adults in the context of daily life activities. This is true, to a greater or lesser degree, in essentially all socioeconomic and cultural environments. Recognizing the critical importance of the early years for the development of literacy, the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and the International Reading Association (IRA) formulated, in 1998, a joint position statement regarding early literacy. That statement included a set of general recommendations for teaching practice. But following the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind legislation of January 2002, and the establishment of the Reading First and Early Reading First programs, early childhood educators are now under heavy pressure to be more specific and to issue standards, or shared expectations, for the literacy development of all children below kindergarten age. Utilizing the actual experiences of six preschool children, The Secret of Natural Readers documents the process of reading development through stories of their early years. The author discusses the implications of natural reading development and its feasibility among preschoolers from different segments of the population. She also spells out, for parents and early childhood teachers, critical information on how preschool children should learn to read.

The short story has been a staple of American literature since the nineteenth century, taught in virtually every high school and consistently popular among adult readers. But what makes a short story unique? In Reading for Storyness, Susan Lohafer, former president of the Society for the Study of the Short Story, argues that there is much more than length separating short stories from novels and other works of fiction. With its close readings of stories by Kate Chopin, Julio Cortázar, Katherine Mansfield, and others, this book challenges assumptions about the short story and effectively redefines the genre in a fresh and original way. In her analysis, Lohafer combines traditional literary theory with a more unconventional mode of research, monitoring the reactions of readers as they progress through a story—to establish a new poetics of the genre. Singling out the phenomenon of "imminent closure" as the genre's defining trait, she then proceeds to identify "preclosure points," or places where a given story could end, in order to access hidden layers of the reading experience. She expertly harnesses this theory of preclosure to explore interactions between pedagogy and theory, formalism and cultural studies, fiction and nonfiction. Returning to the roots of storyness, Lohafer illuminates the intricacies of classic short stories and experimental forms of surreal, postmodern, and minimalist fiction. She also discusses the impact of social constructions, such as gender, on the identification of preclosure points by individual readers. Reading for Storyness combines cognitive science with literary theory to present a compelling argument for the uniqueness of the short story.

First Published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Literary and popular culture has often focused its attention on women readers, particularly since early Victorian times. In Reading Women, an esteemed group of new and established scholars provide a close study of the evolution of the woman reader by examining a wide range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century media, including Antebellum scientific treatises, Victorian paintings, and Oprah Winfrey's televised book club, as well as the writings of Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Zora Neale Hurston. Attending especially to what, how, and why women read, Reading Women brings together a rich array of subjects that sheds light on the defining role the woman reader has played in the formation, not only of literary history, but of British and American culture. The contributors break new ground by focusing on the impact representations of women readers have had on understandings of literacy and certain reading practices, the development of books and print culture, and the categorization of texts into high and low cultural forms.