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Reflecting on 45 years of teaching and research, Lee Galda argues that practice based on transactional theory is essential for the effective teaching of literature.
When I began formal work on my PhD at New York University in the fall of 1977,1 quickly came to realize that I had already learned a great deal about literature for young readers and response to literature, starting with the moment that I stepped into my own classroom in a middle school outside of Chicago in 1963. That first year of teaching was memorable for many reasons, the best of which is what those seventh- and eighth-grade students taught me about the importance of motivation to read and engagement in books. After I established Sustained Silent Reading blocks on Wednesdays, those days became the best day of the week. I began to wonder just what it was about books that turned these often distracted students, many of whom did not like to read, into engaged readers. I had always been a voracious reader, but I knew many others were not. Witnessing the gradual transformation of these young adolescents was astonishing; they were learning to enjoy reading by actually reading books that they enjoyed. A few years later, working on my master of science degree in reading at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, I learned a lot about the processes involved in reading and learning to read, and I also took my first course in children's literature, from Dr. Bette Peltola, in which I rediscovered the bliss of being lost in a book, even though I actually was doing this reading as an assignment for her course.
This bliss went with me back to the classroom in 1973 when I became a reading specialist in the Milwaukee Public Schools, working with elementary-grade classes full of struggling readers. My skills as a reading special- ist were, I'm sure, important to my ability to help these struggling students become more fluent readers, but I'm convinced that it was that rediscovered bliss in books that really made the difference. Thinking of my own joy in reading and of those seventh- and eighth-grade students reading on Wednesdays, I used great books as bait to tempt my students into doing the hard work of learning...