Examines the code-switching patterns of a bilingual preschooler involved in English and German shared reading and independent reading. Finds that melodic text reduced code-switching; her view of the task influenced her code-switching; and her code-switching patterns during discussions were similar to talk outside the literacy event. Suggests qualitatively different benefits of highly predictable and literary texts for literacy/language development.

The editors expound on the term telos, the concept of an optimal developmental outcome that provides the motive for the ways in which people are socialized within a culture. The notion of a telos for schooling is important because it provides the ideal toward which all are expected to gravitate. Conceptions of how students should develop suggest ways of being a teacher and paths for improving practice, which in turn suggest ways of being a teacher educator.

Presents a school-year-long case study of a fourth-grade boy with a history of language difficulties. Describes development of a set of curriculum-centered, classroom-based strategies for language and literacy support. Focuses on changes in the student's language constructions and communicative competence, in the form of the teacher's supportive strategies, and in the speech/language pathologist's role in the classroom.

Investigates elementary school teachers' beliefs and classroom practices about reading. Describes how three of the teachers experimented with new language, beliefs, and/or practices, juxtaposing them with current beliefs and practices. Considers how, at the end of two years, two teachers had altered their beliefs and transformed their practices, primarily because of their inquiry approach.

Available in print version only.

Available in print version only.

Shows how one first-grade teacher explicitly modeled her own authorship processes and how students took up those processes in their own writing. Analyzes classroom discourse to illustrate how the teacher and students shifted roles in the participation framework of writing activity among teacher, author, co-author, and overhearer to facilitate the co-construction of written texts.

Researchers have begun to focus on the role of culture in teaching and learning, drawing on other disciplines to reconsider literacy activities as socially purposeful and culturally grounded. The interest raises two questions: what aspects of culture are more important than others? And what impact does the researcher’s perspective on culture have on the focus and contact of the study? The articles in this issue suggest a range of answers that scholars or offering to these questions.

Describes a teacher-research study using interpretive methods to address the question how learning about language connects secondary students to their world. Profiles three student inquirers, finding the students deepened their awareness of the role language plays in their lives.

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Draws on the work of three students to argue for the value of treating writing as a tool for knowledge building. Claims when writing is used in this way, (1) students extend their repertoire of writing strategies, and (2) the effort students put into creating functionally effective texts plays a role in their learning.

Available in print version only.

Considers the importance of materials from popular culture in children’s literate activities. Emphasizes the dynamic ways in which children adapt symbols from popular culture for their own academic and social purposes. Argues for the need to view popular culture more respectfully.

Studies how experienced teachers of literature created a sense of continuity and coherence in a curriculum over relatively long periods of time. Finds that although the classrooms created a stable set of domain conventions, similarity in broad topics and goals within the curriculum masked great diversity at the level of classroom practice.

Presents a selected, annotated bibliography of recent research in the teaching of English, with most studies appearing in the period between January and June, 1999. Includes sections on assessment; family and workplace literacy; literature; media, society, and literacy; moral education; professional development; reading; research methodology; technology and literacy; and writing.

Describes outcomes of a six-year study of students’ participatory research on literacy motivations and schooling. Suggests the need for a fundamental shift of the dominant epistemology in society and schools to one based on trusting, listening to, and respecting the integrity of the minds of all participants in schooling.

In search of criteria that characterize the research most likely to have an impact in the field of literacy research, the editors include reduction and reciprocity. Writers and readers build a reciprocal relationship - one in which the writer and author are in tune with one another - when the writer considers the processes in which the reader is likely to engage to comprehend the text. Reduction is one such process. Arguments that include images, metaphors, or phrasings that help readers reduce the text become the most memorable and the most influential in the field.

Argues that the marginality of English as a second or foreign language (ESL/EFL) expatriate teachers exemplifies the postmodern condition affecting society at the end of the millennium. Uses the image of the paladin and its juxtaposition with the conceptual framework of postmodernity to generate new ways of thinking about issues in ESL/EFL teaching.

Studies five preschoolers’ response to four genres of picture books: fantasy, realistic, poetic, and information. Finds (1) distinct patterns of response for each genre; and (2) personal associations to the characters, events, images, and topics seemed to form the basis for interpretation.

Questions whether authors can authentically represent a culture of which they are not a part. Considers what kind of shifts will occur in preservice teachers’ understandings of the “right to write.” Finds that as preservice teachers learn more about the current debate through class readings and discussions, they move from straightforward statements to hesitations over the hard issues raised.

Investigates how a secondary-school teacher uses her “turning-point literacy experience” as a narrative template to guide changes in her teaching of literature. Scaffolds students’ narrative modes of thinking in two contrasting classroom contexts: a twelfth-grade class for “at-risk” students and an eleventh-grade class for college-bound students. Provides narrative strategies at points of need.

Traditionally, university faculty have been evaluated and promoted according to their ability to produce sole-authored publications. The age of copyright also pushed to discourage acknowledgement of contributions made by others. However, it has long been acknowledged that new scholarship is based on citation, and social researchers contend that all thought is socially meditated and therefore collaborative. The issue becomes more complicated when research is conducted in conjunction with classroom teachers, whose classroom practices and insights are imperative to the observer’s analysis, and should, therefore, be co-authors.

Describes the role of class discussion and a teacher’s particular discourse moves in the development of an inclusive learning culture in a high school English literature course with a rigorous academic curriculum. Focuses on how the teacher transformed previously tracked gifted and talented and general students’ understandings of what counted as being a reader while negotiating collaboration.

Examines the “whats” and “hows” of first-grade urban children’s appropriation of sports and sports-related media material for participation in unofficial peer worlds and official academic ones. Reveals the potential hybrid nature of even the earliest of children’s written texts. Suggests that learning to write involves work of the imagination on the part of children and teachers.

Explores children’s working knowledge of narrative, scientific, and poetic genres. Finds that children had significantly more experience with narrative genres than either scientific or poetic genres; and possessed more knowledge of text structure than micro-level features such as cohesion markers. Contributes to theorizing genre learning as a complex, contingent, and emergent process of differentiation and integration.

Offers a 30-year retrospective on the evolution of a researcher and of the field of English teaching. Discusses the tradition of scholarship that seeks to ground its approaches to teaching and learning in the best of their understandings of language use and language learning, drawing broadly on rhetoric, linguistics, sociology, literary criticism, cognitive science, and anthropology.

Presents a 43-item selected annotated bibliography of recent research in the teaching of English published, generally, between July through December, 1998. Divides entries into sections on assessment; bilingual/foreign-language education; media, society, and literacy; reading; research methodology; teaching and learning of literature; technology and literacy; and writing.

Uses activist ethnographic field work to explore institutional language skills used by inner-city residents as they negotiated social services institutions. Shows residents’ critical awareness and political acumen as they complied with and resisted the structuring ideology of institutional agents. Raises questions about the methods of key critical pedagogues and the appropriateness of their assumption of false consciousness among disenfranchised people.

Reflects on the notion of community in public life. Considers the importance of developing and sustaining affective relationships in the larger public sphere, engaging in civic literacy (publicly consequential acts of citizenship) complemented and sustained by civil literacy (characterized by a willingness to listen), supported by critical empathy (establishing affective connections with other human beings).

Explores differences in adolescents’ styles of responding to poetry and relates these differences to contrasts in the way students narrate stories of personal experience. Finds contrasts between working-class and middle-class students in styles of responding to poetry which show parallels with their contrasting styles of narrating stories of personal experience.

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Finds that two proficient middle-school readers (in initial encounters with self-selected, unknown words) employed multiple strategies to gain knowledge of new words, including making use of distant and local context, drawing on different types of content connections, doing word-level analysis, and using syntactically appropriate synonyms. They differed substantially on the kinds of content connections on which they drew.

Examines, using grounded theory methods, an interactive, televised writing course taught via Teletechnet, a distance-education program at Old Dominion University. Shows how technology affects a writing classroom and influences the construction of students as writers. Suggests that institutional contexts are reconfigured in televised instruction as virtual and material spaces that allow interesting tensions to emerge.

Examines the relationship between teachers’ perceptions of gender-related differences in grade 6 students’ narrative writing and teachers’ scoring of five student narrative papers. Finds that teachers observed gender-related narrative writing characteristics that were consistent with researchers’ analyses of children’s narrative writing.

Investigates, in a longitudinal study, the spelling development of young deaf children in the context of an integrated process writing classroom. Identifies/categorizes the spelling strategies employed by deaf writers as print-based, speech-based, and sign-based. Provides insights into the nature of cognitive processes in the deaf child.

Investigates how students and professor negotiated different ideas about teaching and reading in a preservice course on teaching secondary school literature. Finds that students’ acceptance or rejection of unfamiliar ideas was closely tied to three major factors: prior experiences with literature, ideas about culturally sanctioned conceptions of the teacher’s role; and the stance and approaches of the professor.

Examines the author’s daughter’s experiences of being socialized into the language of Iceland through the eight-year-old’s immersion in Icelandic culture. Shows how play-based activities with native-speaking peers was critical to her language and literacy development. Argues that authentic activity in social life is the key to learning literacy concepts.

Studies different methods of teaching argumentation to middle school students. Concludes that explicit instruction in argumentative form and argument structure sharpens students’ judgment regarding the content and organization needed to generate logically connected arguments and improves students’ writing of arguments. Finds that such an approach is particularly important for minority students.