Joining The Literacy Club

The essays in this collection reflect Smith's belief that we learn from other people, not so much through conscious emulation as by "joining the club" of people we see ourselves as being like, and by being helped to engage in their activities.

"East Coast and West Coast teachers discuss how they "get it all in" with their respective high school classes"--

Widely considered the standard history of the profession of literary studies, Professing Literature unearths the long-forgotten ideas and debates that created the literature department as we know it today. In a readable and often-amusing narrative, Gerald Graff shows that the heated conflicts of our recent culture wars echo—and often recycle—controversies over how literature should be taught that began more than a century ago. Updated with a new preface by the author that addresses many of the provocative arguments raised by its initial publication, Professing Literature remains an essential history of literary pedagogy and a critical classic. “Graff’s history. . . is a pathbreaking investigation showing how our institutions shape literary thought and proposing how they might be changed.”— The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism

This book helps education professionals understand the changing social, political, and economic conditions for language and literacy instruction and second language learning in particular contexts.

Frank Smith is internationally acclaimed as an essential contributor to research on the nature of reading and as an originator of the modern psycholinguistic approach to reading instruction. In his publications his aim has always been to support teachers, to encourage them to make teaching decisions based on knowledge and understanding, to analyze what their students are trying to do and why what the students are doing doesn’t always correspond with what they are expected to do. Now the major topics addressed in his work are available in one volume, Landmarks in Literacy, a thoughtfully crafted selection of 16 of his key writings. In the World Library of Educationalists, international scholars themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest works so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Readers thus are able to follow the themes and strands of their work and see their contribution to the development of a field, as well as the development of the field itself.

Research-proven activities that engage students in active processing of new information, leading to deeper understanding, long-term retention of subject matter, and acquisition of life-long learning skills.