Researchers of literacies in out-of-school settings often argue that their studies hold significant implications for teaching practices. This argument seems to be partially supported by studies that have won the Alan C. Purves Award between 1998 and 2001, acknowledging RTE articles most likely to impact educational practice. Yet this line of inquiry obviously does not lessen the continuing need for rigorous classroom-based research. As I contemplate future directions for such work, a set of interrelated questions come to mind: To what extent should researchers be better prepared to engage in aspects of the specific teaching practices they are researching or designing? In what ways would engagements of this nature influence or potentially improve research findings and pedagogical designs? To what extent should researchers be prepared to “walk the walk” of implementing teaching practices in conjunction with “talking the talk” of researching and reporting on them?

This article explores the writing opportunities provided to Spanish-speaking and Mandarinspeaking English Language Learners at the fourth and fifth-grade level across the various classroom settings in which they participated daily: an all-English speaking classroom, an Englishas- a-second language (ESL) classroom, and a native-language classroom. The students’ school routines were quite complicated, as each interacted daily with several different teachers, and each setting entailed different tasks, expectations, and rules for governing interaction. As a result, students’ views of writing at school were somewhat fragmented. Even when assignments ostensibly focused on authentic communication, the students did not always recognize the purpose or value. Students primarily wrote expository essays, and seldom engaged in extended talk concerning the purposes and audiences for the texts they produced. Further, students were not encouraged to write in their native languages in settings other than their Chinese or Spanish classes, and, therefore, did not have many opportunities to explore their linguistic and cultural identities in the all-English or ESL settings. Despite these limitations, most of the students successfully negotiated the complex curriculum and found ways to explore their bilingual/bicultural identities.

Drawn from a year-long study in a combined first- and second-grade classroom, this article presents an interpretive portrait of two young students engaged in spontaneous talk while writing. We analyze their conversations to explore the subject positions these student writers assumed, those they assigned each other, and the related functions they assigned the texts they composed. Through our close reading of their conversations, we develop an analytic protocol for positional microanalysis of everyday conversations that honors the intertwined social and emotional dimensions of peer interactions. Countering those who would cast literacy development as the sequential attainment of discrete cognitive skills, we consider the ways that these social and emotional dimensions may interlace with intellectual growth as young children struggle to become students, writers, and people.

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In 1986, while still at Harvard, I started teaching summer school at the Bread Loaf School of English, the graduate program in English of Middlebury College. Bread Loaf offers courses in literature, theater, and writing—where I fit in. I came to that job with a background in applied linguistics and cognitive development, but not in literature, and so started out feeling professionally marginal. But appropriation of interests and understandings from repeated participation in a powerful environment has its effects, and I’m now increasingly intrigued by differences in perspectives on texts between language research and the humanities. This is my first attempt to consider them together.

While recent studies have demonstrated the importance of material structures in shaping writers’ roles and practices in academic settings, relatively little attention has been focused on temporality, which exists as an embedded aspect of all such structures.

The authors gave the following talk at the 2003 NCTE Annual Convention in San Francisco upon receiving the Alan C. Purves Award, presented to the RTE article from the previous year’s volume judged most likely to have an impact on classroom practice. Writing as lead author, Pauline Harris traces the history of her interest in children’s intertextuality through her life as a classroom teacher, her doctoral studies in the Bay Area, and her recent work with colleagues Jillian Trezise and W. N. Winser in Australia. As they describe the impetus behind their award-winning article and suggest directions for future research, the authors challenge classroom teachers to understand children’s intertextuality as a source of pleasure and complexity, and as a guide to appropriate and engaging instruction.

English departments are increasingly under pressure to offer writing courses online, but research that informs effective pedagogies—including effective ways to respond to students’ drafts—is still limited.

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Though high-stakes testing currently dominates educational policy, few studies examine the consequences of such testing for the teaching and learning of literature in secondary English classrooms. This study takes a multi-layered approach to specify how a high-stakes exam positioned students as readers of literary texts.

The committee reviews important research works in the teaching of English that have been published in the last year. Committee members include Richard Beach, Peggy DeLapp, Deborah Dillon, Lee Galda, Timothy Lensmire, Lauren Liang, David O’Brien, and Constance Walker.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, people began filing into a community movie theater in Oakland, California known for its alternative films and sofa seating. They had gathered to watch the digital stories created by young people from the community—three-to-five minute multi-media compositions consisting of a narrative recorded in the author’s voice accompanied by photographs, video, and music. The event began with a story by Randy, “Lyfe-n-Rhyme.” “Mama’s only son is mama’s only gun with a guillotine tongue,” rang one rhythmic powerful line, as images of Randy and his mother morphed into photographs of the county jail, while the music of Miles Davis floated in the background. So proceeded Randy’s social critique and commentary on life and opportunity, or the lack thereof, in his city and country.

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This article describes a year-long process in which a group of fourth- and fifth-grade students with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds learned to participate in reading, writing, and talking about books in a literature-based instructional program.

In this article, we analyze literacy events co-constructed by three bilingual, mainland Puerto Rican kindergartners and the network of adults and children in their homes who support their developing literacy.

This article examines three English teachers’ conceptions of their students’ literary understandings. I focus on the teachers’ conceptualizations of the act of reading in relation to literary understanding and how they responded to videotape artifacts of their students reading literature.

We live in a time of the celebration of high technology and symbolic analysis, even predictions of the end of common work, yet physical work, work of body and hand, surrounds us, makes everyday life possible. For about six years now, I have been involved in a research project exploring the thought it takes to do physical work, the cognitive processes involved in various blue collar and service occupations like waitressing, hairstyling, plumbing, welding, industrial assembly, and the like. The study has led me to consider the way we categorize occupations, define intelligence, and think about learning and schooling. Of particular interest to readers of RTE will be my findings in the realm of literacy and numeracy. A number of people have already done important research on job-related literacy. What follows is in line with their research, though I would like to use it to help us reconsider some of the traditional ways we define and discuss written language, numbers, and graphics.

This study draws on queer theory, critical feminism, Critical Race Theory, and New Literacy Studies to explore the ways in which queer youth read and wrote words and worlds in ways that both challenged and reinforced power dynamics in and beyond a youth-run center for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth.

This article investigates the use of oral narratives by a 7-year-old Mexican born girl (Isabela) participating in small group literature discussions in a bilingual 2nd-grade classroom in the U.S. over a year. The study is grounded in sociocultural and critical perspectives and uses narrative and transactional theories to understand literacy events.

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Twice a year, in the May and November issues, RTE publishes a selected bibliography of recent research in the teaching of English.

We gratefully acknowledge the time and effort of the following colleagues in reviewing manuscripts considered for Research in the Teaching of English.

This study examines the concept of presentism as it relates to historical fiction written for young people. Presentism includes (1) writerly presentism, i.e., the imposition of a writer’s modern values, beliefs, or awarenesses onto a past era; and (2) readerly presentism, i.e., the imposition of a reader’s modern values, beliefs, or awarenesses onto a past era.

We gratefully acknowledge the time and effort of the following colleagues in reviewing manuscripts considered for Research in the Teaching of English.

This paper describes two contrasting classroom contexts for eliciting personal narratives, with analysis based on reading group interactions video-recorded weekly during the second semester of each year.

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A year-long, 2-level case study was conducted to examine both the complex writing performances of three students in a 2nd-3rd grade class and the instructional strategies of their teacher, focusing on the interplay between the children’s strategy use and the teacher’s instruction.

This article examines the notion of caring in the teaching of English. Although Nel Noddings’s work has paved the way for more caring approaches to teaching, aspects of her formulation must be reconsidered in order to ensure caring instruction for the most powerless and most needy students.

Fecho’s talk at the 2002 NCTE Conference upon receiving the Alan C. Purves Award involved the considerations faced by practitioner researchers as they write for publication, particularly as they encounter the template of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association.

We are pleased to announce that Bob Fecho of The University of Georgia is the winner of the 2002 Alan C. Purves Award for his article “‘Why Are You DoingThis?’: Acknowledging and Transcending Threat in a Critical Inquiry Classroom.”

While social constructivist interpretations have advanced a relational, multiple, and fluid conception of identity, one difficult problem involves understanding how identities are stabilized during the course of interaction. This article argues that interactants define and stabilize identity by producing identity artifacts with multimodal means, by constructing configurations of those artifacts, and by using those artifacts to project social space.

This essay outlines the beginnings of a political economy of the children’s literature publishing industry. Central to the analysis is a consideration of the continuing commodification of children’s literature, the increase in the licensing and merchandizing of characters from children’s books and popular films, and the proliferation of series books that have assumed the status of brand names comparable to other commercial commodities.

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Deborah Brown, Catherine Beavis, Judith Kalman, Gert Rijlaarsdam, Anne D’Antonio Stinson, Melissa E. Whiting Twice a year, in the May and November issues, RTE publishes a selected bibliography of recent research in the teaching of English. The listing is selective; we make no attempt to include all research and research-related articles that appeared in the period under review.

This study examines how 10 kindergarten through 4thgrade teachers shared poems and stories with their students. Analysis focused on how teachers performed the texts, how children participated in reading the texts, and what kinds of discussions and curriculum activities surrounded the readings. Full text available in print issue only.

The paper focuses on intertextual conflicts during teacher-class interactions where teachers are reading and modeling texts as well as guiding children to read and talk about text content, purposes, genres, and structures. These conflicts are identified and examined within a conceptual framework that accounts for intertextuality in terms of written texts, lived experiences, lessons, and processes in individuals.

This study describes ways in which a small group of preschool children responded to typical information books during read-aloud sessions. Responses were coded according to a content analysis system that included focus of talk and type of talk. The results indicate that even young children are attuned to characteristics of texts and that those characteristics (especially illustrations) have a powerful influence on children’s responses.

Presents annotations of 37 selected recent research in the teaching of English and related fields. Addresses bilingual/foreign language education, discourse processes, literacy, professional development, reading, teaching and learning of literature, teaching and learning of writing, and technology and literacy. Notes that most of the studies appeared during the six-month period from July through December 2001.

Examines the discourse in an English as a second or other language (ESoL) classroom in a best-case scenario that contrasted dramatically with more typical school settings. Samples student critical turns (SCTs) across a six-week literature-rich science unit. Shows that the teacher played a crucial role in extended dialogue among students.