The Department of English congratulates Professor Janice Bland, who recently published her latest book, Compelling Stories for English Language Learners — Creativity, Interculturality and Critical Literacy (Bloomsbury, 2022). At a research seminar on October 20th, Prof. Bland presented her book to a group of visiting researchers from Norway, Canada, and Colombia, as well as guests attending digitally, followed by a cocktail reception in her honor. 

The book promotes reading as central to language education in order to experience perspectives from around the world, and demonstrates the many opportunities for teaching with compelling stories, encouraging an active and engaged community of second language readers through challenging picturebooks, motivating graphic novels, dynamic plays, enchanting verse novels and compelling young adult fiction. It also provides a new, research-based Deep Reading Framework for working with stories in the English classroom.