You Mean that Really Happened?!: Using Nonfiction to Engage Struggling Readers

Nonfiction texts used in a middle school classroom encouraged struggling readers to explore other nonfiction texts and to write about the world around them. Rosenblatt’s (1978) transactional theory of reader response posits that an interaction takes place among reader, author, and text during reading. The nonfiction texts Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books (Paulsen, 2001) and Night (Wiesel, 2006) sparked students’ interest in real-life stories of survival and prompted struggling readers to read other nonfiction stories and to reflect upon and share text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections through discussion and writing.