ABSTRACT
For much of this century, reading instruction in American elementary schools has been guided by a belief that children will learn to read well through mastery of linguistic artifact. The teaching of “reading skills” has become the raison d’etre of instruction in classrooms where reading is believed to be a text-driven event. The study of literary texts has been similarly conceptualized, with student attention focused on mastery of “a special vocabulary for describing the properties of poems and the establishment of standard methods of explication” (Tompkins, 1980, p. 223).
