What is Morpheme

Lately there has been a renewed push to base educational policy and curriculum around the “science of reading.” The theories of reading that undergird this movement have intermittently been updated, but nevertheless they are inadequate for guiding the teaching of literature. Because these theories tend to focus on meaning at the word level, they overlook text-based challenges. Additionally, they give insufficient priority to many reader-based factors such as background knowledge and strategy use. This chapter explores these shortcomings and how they obscure the ways that successful readers of literature make use of prior knowledge, affective involvement, and literature-specific reading strategies in order to overcome the special challenges presented by literary text and construct textual meaning. Implications for classroom teaching are discussed.