Developing Book Clubs in High School English Classrooms

• Main Author: Chen, Ying
• Other Authors: Kooy, Mary
• Language: en_ca
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: BOOK CLUB; READING; LITERATURE; LITERACY; 0727; 0279
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/33636

The focus of this research is to examine the book club as a social context for literacy development. Students in book clubs perceive literature authentically in ways of reading, writing and talking through a variety of interactions. Meanwhile, teachers, by observing students’ learning in book clubs, reflect on their language teaching and lead to an innovation of literacy instruction in schools, which can bridge to a community instructional change for language teachers. In this research, I observed, videotaped, audio-taped, and interviewed high school students and the teacher in an urban Canadian high school, who were involved in English classroom book clubs which replaced the traditional instructional mode of teaching literature, trying to figure out a structure for a classroom book club by comparing to an extracurricular book club and by analyzing the diverse reading experiences of students both in and outside of school.