Literature Circles student roles are: Literature Circles Discussion Leader, Literature Circles Question Writer, Literature Circles Passage Reader, and Literature Circles Word Finder. Students in a Literature Circles Group participate in all of the above tasks or roles.

Literature Circles engage the interests of many teachers of literature and their enthusiastic circles of students. The concept behind Literature Circles--small student-led groups in circles discussing literature they have chosen.

Why Literature Circles Book Clubs?

While teaching specific reading strategies is important, I believe that the paramount activity in improving reading ability is reading. Research shows that kids learn to read and become better readers by...reading. Some days my students beg to read the whole hour, so I let them and try not to feel guilty about it! Sit back and just watch your class one day during independent reading and you will notice that it takes 12 to 15 minutes for most of your students to let go of the world around them and settle into their books. Despite what we might think, the typical student day doesn't include much time spent actually reading. So, sometimes you have to ignore your well planned calendar, toss out your lesson plans, and just read!

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Paralleling the growth of adult book clubs, which-perhaps energized by Oprah Winfrey-have doubled over the past decade to something over 100,000 nationally, Literature Circles now engage the interests of many millions of school children and their enthusiastic teachers. The concept behind Literature Circles-small student-led groups discussing books they have chosen for themselves-has been endorsed by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the International Reading Association as one of the "best classroom practices" in their 1996 Standards for the English Language Arts.

These standards express our diverse society's expanding dependency-in a world of e-mail, digital imaging, and mediated mass communications-on universal competence in spoken, written, and visual communications. They reflect the 1991 National Literacy Act's broader definition of literacy as "an individual's ability to read, write, and speak in English and compute and solve problems at levels of proficiency necessary to function on the job and in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential."

Defining what children should know about language and what they should be able to do with it, the NCTE Standards call for proficiency in six language arts, which can be grouped in three linked pairs:

• Reading and writing- print-oriented language.
• Listening and speaking- spoken communication.
• Viewing and visually representing- visual language.

Several of the twelve NCTE Standards are directly addressed in Literature Circles, where students develop the academic and social skills to collaborate in choosing what they read and in preparing and leading subsequent discussions with the aid of a variety of media. In doing so they may use all the language arts-written, spoken, and visual-in the critical analysis of what they have read.

An informative account of the fifteen-year evolution of Literature Circles by one of its leading pioneers forms the introductory chapter of Harvey Daniels' Literature Circles: Voice and Choice in Book Clubs and Reading Groups (Stenhouse, 2002), which is available for download at http://www.literaturecircles.com/readings.htm

Learn More about Literature Circles Reading Programs, and Book Clubs e-booklets.