ABSTRACT
Reading and writing are crucial abilities, both in school and out. Educators who feel an obligation to bring students to the highest possible levels of competency in these basic skills have used a wide variety of teaching approaches based on theory, research, and intuition. These practical efforts have variously and somewhat haphazardly stressed what students should learn, how they learn, and even how they feel about learning, particularly with respect to their individual likes and dislikes, interests, emotions, and cultural orientations. By contrast, research over the last 20 years has had a strongly cognitive orientation, with little concern for the affective factors with which the schools have had to cope. Only recently have some cognitive researchers begun to recognize and study the affective aspects of learning.
