Since the early 1990s, language and literacy scholars have explored the pedagogical potential of hip-hop culture in the English language arts classroom. Despite more than 25 years’ worth of peer-reviewed research documenting its effectiveness, hip-hop pedagogies continue to be relegated to the margins of English education policy and practice. In this essay, I argue that the future of “hip-hop based education” (HHBE) research in English education demands moving beyond making a case for hip-hop’s pedagogical merits and toward helping teachers and teacher educators put theories of HHBE into practice, given their various identities and institutional contexts. Thus, I begin by addressing practical and philosophical dilemmas regarding the role, purpose, and function of hip-hop-based curricular interventions in this current era of the Common Core State Standards. As the title of this Forum piece suggests, hip-hop culture and pedagogy are more than just rap music and textual analysis. Therefore, I seek to shift the conversation from pedagogies with hip-hop texts to a more complex unit of analysis known as “pedagogies with hip-hop aesthetics.” With a broader and deeper understanding of hip-hop cultural knowledge, as well as the tensions and contradictions contributing to the shortcomings of HHBE research, I conclude with a call for additional studies that “show and prove” the possibilities (and pitfalls) of hip-hop pedagogies in English language arts and English education classrooms.

In a moment when schools are failing to meet the needs of many youth, recent research has suggested that relational and art-based pedagogies, such as spoken word poetry, offer possibilities for repurposing classrooms to meet the needs of students who have experienced marginalization in schools and other institutions. This article contributes to the literature in critical pedagogy and youth spoken word by taking a retrospective perspective to analyze what a group of urban youth who experienced failure in schools remembered as meaningful from a high school poetry class they identified as empowering. Using case study and interview methods to unpack participants’memories of their poetry class as early adults, the study identifies that the poetry community served as a turning point for many youth because it allowed them to nurture healing relationships in the context of a school community that helped them shatter institutional silence about various forms of oppression and trauma and sparked changes in the ways they saw themselves as individuals and community members. Through participation in the structures and rituals of this literacy-learning community, participants remembered developing agentive identities and transforming their struggles into sources of strength. That this class and the writing practices it engendered continued to hold meaning for this group of youth, who had otherwise held generally negative narratives about schooling, advances current perspectives on the role of nontraditional approaches to literacy instruction in schools.

Studies on writing development have grown in diversity and depth in recent decades, but remain fragmented along lines of theory, method, and age ranges or populations studied. Meaningful, competent writing performances that meet the demands of the moment rely on many kinds of well-practiced and deeply understood capacities working together; however, these capacities’ realization and developmental trajectories can vary from one individual to another. Without an integrated framework to understand lifespan development of writing abilities in its variation, high-stakes decisions about curriculum, instruction, and assessment are often made in unsystematic ways that may fail to support the development they are intended to facilitate; further, research may not consider the range of issues at stake in studying writing in any particular moment.To address this need and synthesize what is known about the various dimensions of writing development at different ages, the coauthors of this essay have engaged in sustained discussion, drawing on a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Drawing on research from different disciplinary perspectives, they propose eight principles upon which an account of writing development consistent with research findings could be founded. These principles are proposed as a basis for further lines of inquiry into how writing develops across the lifespan.

Despite the growing evidence of the language and literacy benefits of collaborative discussions for English language learners, the factors contributing to productive discussions that promote ELLs’ positive language outcomes are less understood. This study examined the influence of teacher talk, students’ initial language and literacy skills, and home language backgrounds on the discussion proficiency of four groups participating in eight peer-led literature discussions, called collaborative reasoning (CR), in two 5th-grade classrooms serving mainly Spanish-speaking ELLs. Levels of discussion proficiency were determined using a holistic rating approach and utterance-by utterance coding of discourse features. Teachers’ scaffolding moves were coded. Students’ pre- and post-intervention language and literacy skills and home language backgrounds were assessed. Results showed greater group variation in discussion proficiency in the mainstream class than in the bilingual class. The two teachers differed in their ways of facilitating CR discussions. Group discussion proficiency was associated with oral English skills (sentence grammar) and reading comprehension, as well as student English language use at home and parental assistance with homework. The talk volume and indicators of high-level comprehension such as articulating and responding to alternative perspectives, elaborations, extratextual connections, and uses of textual evidence were associated with post-intervention language and literacy outcomes. These findings contribute to the understanding of sources of variations in discussion proficiency among groups composed predominantly of ELLs and provide implications for teacher scaffolding strategies to facilitate ELLs’ learning and participation in classroom discussions.

Although multiple studies have found that peer review is an effective instructional practice for the teaching of academic writing in K–12 settings, little research exists that documents students’ views of peer review and the features that make peer review tasks useful or challenging for writing development. In this study, we investigated high school students’ perceptions of peer review through a questionnaire administered to 513 students from four schools who had used SWoRD, an online peer review system. Data were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Our findings demonstrate that most students viewed peer review as helpful to their writing development and that students consistently viewed three features of the SWoRD peer review system as most beneficial: anonymity of writers and reviewers, opportunities to review other students’ writing, and feedback from multiple readers. Students reported difficulty with managing conflicting reviews and wording their feedback. Our study contributes to existing research on peer review of writing by suggesting that secondary peer review activities would be more helpful to students if they considered students’ concerns about social positioning and face-saving, allowed writers to receive feedback from multiple reviewers, and taught students how to manage conflicting reviews. Additionally, our study suggests that the benefits of reviewing have been greatly underestimated in existing research and that students would benefit from more opportunities to give, as well as receive, feedback on academic writing.

More than four generations ago, Nancy Coryell’s (1927) study revealed that an extensive approach to reading instruction is more effective than an intensive approach, yet the reading establishment then continued to promote intensive, close reading methods. Recently, the writers of the Common Core State Standards renewed this debate by advocating that teachers implement more intensive, close reading strategies. I replicated a portion of Coryell’s (1927) study to determine the effectiveness of intensive and extensive reading instruction; to do so, I examined the impact each method had on students’ comprehension and analysis of literature. The study used a quasi-experimental, nonrandomized, pretest-post test comparison group research design. I used test procedures to measure the difference in pretest-to-post test scores within and between both groups for both comprehension and analysis. No statistically significant differences existed in the gains on the subtest measuring reading comprehension; however, statistically significant differences in gains on the subtest measuring analysis of literature were found within both instructional methods. At a time when policy seems to drive English instruction toward an intensive approach, this study suggests that we need more research before the field of English education can properly debate the issue.

In this Forum, colleagues remember and celebrate the life and legacy of Arthur Applebee, a former editor of Research in the Teaching of English and a leader in the field for many years, who passed away after a short illness on September 20, 2015. Intellectually, Arthur will be remembered for the sheer scope of his work over four decades, for his mentoring of several generations of scholars, for his contributions to research on literature and writing instruction in secondary schools, and for his theoretical work on “curriculum as conversation,” which has left an indelible mark on classroom discourse studies and English teacher education. More personally, Arthur’s friends and colleagues cherished his human kindness, generosity, humility, thoughtfulness, gentleness, equanimity, and affability.

This article identifies five categories of resources that preservice teachers drew on as they considered student writing and planned their own approaches to assessing and teaching writing. Identifying these resources helps us better understand how beginning writing teachers think about student writing—and better understand mismatches that commonly occur between what teacher educators teach and what new teachers actually do. Our study builds on literature that considers how writing teachers are prepared, extends research about how preservice teachers use what they learn, and adds layers of detail to literature about the resources that beginning teachers draw upon to aid and support them in their work. The pedagogical and research projects described in this study stem from a communities-of-practice framework. Our methods surfaced preservice teachers’ claims about writing and the resources they drew upon to support those claims. Drawing upon our rhetorical view of writing, we worked inductively to identify these claims and resources, using grounded analysis of transcripts from preservice teachers’ VoiceThread conversations to develop a taxonomy of 15 resources grouped into 5 categories: understanding of students and student writing; knowledge of context; colleagues; roles; and writing. This research has implications for educators and researchers working in teacher preparation. Scaffolded instruction is essential to help beginning teachers use particular resources—and to employ resources in ways connected with rhetorical conceptual frameworks. To that end, the taxonomy of resources can be used as a tool for individual and programmatic assessment, as well as to facilitate scaffolded instruction.

This phenomenological case study explores the disconnect that high school readers labeled as struggling perceived between their reading identities and experiences in traditional English classes. It analyzes how participation in a young adult literature (YAL) elective provided participants space in which to enact identities and exhibit agency in ways that were different from those afforded in their English classes. This paper contributes uniquely to the larger research conversation by examining two different spaces (traditional English classes and a YAL class) and demonstrating how students’ identities as readers manifested in different ways across two contexts. Using Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain’s (1998) theory of identity as a lens of analysis across student-generated oral reflections gathered through Seidman’s (2006) interview protocol, the study reveals how student participants were supported in their attempts to deconstruct their experiences in traditional classroom spaces, build new conceptions of their reading selves in a unique classroom setting, and, in the process, assume greater agency in shaping their individual reader identities, advancing the argument that differing classroom contexts can provide students with varying levels of opportunity to reject and/or accept ascribed reading identities. This work is significant in the way it emphasizes the importance of classroom and school contexts, the possibilities that come with inviting students to engage as readers in school rather than engage in school reading, the benefits and risks of reimagined relationships between students and teachers and students and peers, and the possibility that young adult literature in and of itself offers implications for reader agency.

In this essay, Sperling and DiPardo place their editorship in the context of key national and global currents of that time, which continue to evolve today. They argue that these currents touch on the work of English, language arts, and literacy educators, reflecting and shaping a number of phenomena: ever-new and surging cultural, social, and language diversities in our classrooms;technology’s mark on language and literacy, along with its benefits and constraints; the sometimes heavy hand of politics and policy on the day-to-day workings of the classroom; and, in sum, what it is that we’re supposed to teach and know as part of our English/language arts calling. This essay embeds itself in these issues in discussing RTE research from 2003 to 2008 and in thinking about the issues and research our field will encounter in the coming years.

The expert teams compiling this annual bibliography looked for major or large studies that held significant implications for teaching English language arts, as well as research that might lead to new insights into the paradigms or methodological practices within a given field.

Conducted through a collaboration between the Council of Writing Program Administrators(CWPA) and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), this study identified andtested new variables for examining writing’s relationship to learning and development. EightyCWPA members helped to establish a consensus model of 27 effective writing practices. EightyUS baccalaureate institutions appended questions to the NSSE instrument based on these 27practices, yielding responses from 29,634 first-year students and 41,802 seniors. Confirmatoryfactor analysis identified three constructs: Interactive Writing Processes, Meaning-Making WritingTasks, and Clear Writing Expectations. Regression analyses indicated that the constructs werepositively associated with two sets of established constructs in the regular NSSE instrument “DeepApproaches to Learning (Higher-Order Learning, Integrative Learning, and Reflective Learning)and Perceived Gains in Learning and Development as defined by the institution’s contributionsto growth in Practical Competence, Personal and Social Development, and General EducationLearning” with effect sizes that were consistently greater than those for the number of pageswritten. These were net results after controlling for institutional and student characteristics, aswell as other factors that might contribute to enhanced learning. The study adds three empiricallyestablished constructs to research on writing and learning. It extends the positive impact of writing beyond learning course material to include Personal and Social Development. Although correlational, it can provide guidance to instructors, institutions, accreditors, and other stakeholders because of the nature of the questions associated with the effective writing constructs.

Conducted through a collaboration between the Council of Writing Program Administrators(CWPA) and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), this study identified andtested new variables for examining writing’s relationship to learning and development. EightyCWPA members helped to establish a consensus model of 27 effective writing practices. EightyUS baccalaureate institutions appended questions to the NSSE instrument based on these 27practices, yielding responses from 29,634 first-year students and 41,802 seniors. Confirmatoryfactor analysis identified three constructs: Interactive Writing Processes, Meaning-Making WritingTasks, and Clear Writing Expectations. Regression analyses indicated that the constructs werepositively associated with two sets of established constructs in the regular NSSE instrument “DeepApproaches to Learning (Higher-Order Learning, Integrative Learning, and Reflective Learning)and Perceived Gains in Learning and Development as defined by the institution’s contributionsto growth in Practical Competence, Personal and Social Development, and General EducationLearning” with effect sizes that were consistently greater than those for the number of pageswritten. These were net results after controlling for institutional and student characteristics, aswell as other factors that might contribute to enhanced learning. The study adds three empiricallyestablished constructs to research on writing and learning. It extends the positive impact of writing beyond learning course material to include Personal and Social Development. Although correlational, it can provide guidance to instructors, institutions, accreditors, and other stakeholders because of the nature of the questions associated with the effective writing constructs.

The social media campaign #WeNeedDiverseBooks has called for more varied works of literature. However, one of the arguments for increasing the visibility of diverse books has not received much attention: using #WNDB to cultivate religiously pluralistic thinkers. Currently, there is a conflict between the evasion of religious neutrality in English language arts (ELA) instruction and the need to prepare young people to become pluralistic thinkers in a global society. This article examines three lines of inquiry: How likely are preservice teachers to (a) include children’s books with religious diversity in their future classrooms, (b) discuss the religious content of the books with their future students, and/or (c) employ dominant social discourses in interpreting the religious content? Grounded in theories of religious neutrality, social discourses, and cultural superiority,the study analyzes 79 preservice teachers’ responses to the cultural-religious milieu of the renowned picture book memoir In My Family/En Mi Familia (Garza, 1996). The corpus of data, which includes the preservice teachers’ written reflections and responses to a set of open-ended questions,indicates that privileging a nonreligious reading lens and excluding relevant religious perspectives from discussions about diverse works of children’s literature can inadvertently contribute to the defamation of other cultures and religious traditions. The study underscores the responsibility of teacher educators to help preservice teachers take a religiously neutral approach to ELA instruction.

This article explores how the sociohistorical context mandates literacy and education for AfricanAmerican persons living in a small community (“Pinesville”) in the rural U.S. South. Applying a sociocultural lens to literacy, the narrative perspective proposed is used to assert that literacy experiences are historically continuous, and rooted in shared cultural beliefs that have existed for African Americans since slavery. Such a perspective also apprehends an individual’s life history narratives as culturally saturated and situated within collective “frames of memory” (Brockmeier,2002, p. 24). Through the presentation of data poems for Miss Sally Harris, I argue that Miss Sally’s literacy experiences reflect a collective, cultural commitment to using literacy for self-determination, creating new opportunities for oneself and others, and preparing persons to use literacy for societal participation. I then link these beliefs to three mandates for literacy and education within Pinesville: (1) using literacy and education to determine one’s life course; (2)forging intellectual and social pathways through literacy and education; and (3) facilitating others’education and preparing persons to use literacy for “the dominating culture’s institutions” (Harris ,1992, p. 276). I conclude by asserting the significance of life history and data poems for conducting person-centered literacy research. I contend that within communities like Pinesville, literacy and education exist synergistically and can be useful for addressing issues of equity and access.

This study uses dialogic theory to understand teacher-writers’ practices across in- and out-of-school contexts. Using case study methods to closely observe and interview a middle school teacher and a high school teacher, as well as analyze their writing, the study identified similarities in the teachers’ appropriations of language, textual practices, and ideologies across contexts. However, each teacher appropriated distinct practices in discipline-specific ways, with one focused onthe literate practices of creative writers and the other focused on the literate practices of online, networked writers. These contrastive examples highlight ways in which teacher-writers’ literate and instructional activities dialogically inform each other in both similar and distinct ways. Ultimately, I make the argument that dialogic perspectives that attend to teachers’ out-of-school practices provide richer, more complex understandings of instructional practice than currently popular conceptions of “best practices” and “value-added” teaching.

This essay examines high school poetry instruction in the 1920s and 1930s in light of the influence of Hughes Mearns, a teacher who wrote about and lectured on his experiences in teaching what he coined “creative writing” and who played a major role in reconceiving how teachers taught students to read and write poetry. Rather than focusing on memorization and recitation, Hughes enacted an experiential and “emotional” method of teaching students poetry. This student-centered approach reflected major thoughts in pedagogical progressivism of the period at the same time that it conflicted with the education tracking and standardization that also took shape under the name of progressivism. The innovative work of Mearns and teachers who embraced his philosophies is especially important to revisit given the analogies to our own period,where spoken-word programs, for example, exist alongside school standardization measures that often devalue poetry. Understanding the arguments Mearns and other teachers made for the unique value of poetry, as well as some of the shortcomings in their thought, can help educators to better articulate the need for K–12 poetry instruction now.

Cultivating interaction among English Language Learners (ELLs) and their non-ELL peers remains a desirable, yet often elusive, goal. While existing literature documents the challenges of ELL/non-ELL interaction and proposes strategies for overcoming them, there is little research examining concrete episodes of interaction from both the ELL and non-ELL perspectives. In response, I explore how a group of refugee and immigrant high school students (ELLs and non-ELLs) negotiated their interaction while collaboratively creating a digital video. In particular, I consider the role of the “language barrier” and how the participants interacted through and despite language. In the tradition of humanities-oriented educational research, I draw on Levinasian philosophy to reflect on the relational and ethical aspects of ELL/non-ELL interaction. Findings suggest that while language played a key role, communication obstacles tended to defy simple and strategic anticipation and resolution. Negotiation of meaning was often a creative, situated, and multidirectional process. Most importantly, interaction seemed to be ultimately about people in relationship—uncertain and at times uncomfortable, but also full of promise and opportunities for ethical response. I propose opening spaces as a new approach to ELL/non-ELL interaction that foregrounds human and ethical dimensions. Such reframing dislodges the issue from common assumptions which may unwittingly reduce ELLs to a “language problem,” and it honors the potential of participants creatively working out the interaction for themselves. By pursuing insights from both ELLs and non-ELLs, this study offers an important perspective rarely explored in the literature.

Cultivating interaction among English Language Learners (ELLs) and their non-ELL peers remains a desirable, yet often elusive, goal. While existing literature documents the challenges of ELL/non-ELL interaction and proposes strategies for overcoming them, there is little research examining concrete episodes of interaction from both the ELL and non-ELL perspectives. In response, I explore how a group of refugee and immigrant high school students (ELLs and non-ELLs) negotiated their interaction while collaboratively creating a digital video. In particular, I consider the role of the “language barrier” and how the participants interacted through and despite language. In the tradition of humanities-oriented educational research, I draw on Levinasian philosophy to reflect on the relational and ethical aspects of ELL/non-ELL interaction. Findings suggest that while language played a key role, communication obstacles tended to defy simple and strategic anticipation and resolution. Negotiation of meaning was often a creative, situated, and multidirectional process. Most importantly, interaction seemed to be ultimately about people in relationship—uncertain and at times uncomfortable, but also full of promise and opportunities for ethical response. I propose opening spaces as a new approach to ELL/non-ELL interaction that foregrounds human and ethical dimensions. Such reframing dislodges the issue from common assumptions which may unwittingly reduce ELLs to a “language problem,” and it honors the potential of participants creatively working out the interaction for themselves. By pursuing insights from both ELLs and non-ELLs, this study offers an important perspective rarely explored in the literature.

In this set of essays, the authors argue for the importance of affect and emotion in literacy education, teacher education, and classroom life. In the introduction, Boldt describes the authors’ shared belief in learning as happening within a landscape of relationships and emergent life in classrooms and beyond. The introduction makes clear that while the authors are writing from different intellectual traditions, they share a sense of anger about the fetishization of standardization, testing, and methods at the expense of ambiguity, improvisation, and unexpected, disruptive, and enlivening classroom relationships. In the first essay, Lewis demonstrates how emotion is regulated in a secondary English classroom and yet can never be fully regulated, giving rise to discomfort and to unexpected transformations of signs. In the second essay, Leander argues for a more emergent vision of lesson planning that begins with the body and its expression of energies and potentials in the present. In the final essay, Boldt urges that teachers be provided with opportunities to openly examine their negative emotional responses—including anxiety and, at times, aggression—to mismatches between children and what is required in a high-stakes environment. Throughout the essays, the authors enact rather than describe a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective, laying their differences and their shared commitments side-by-side in the hope of creating for themselves and their readers new sets of relations and possibilities and, with those, the condition of potential for imagination and desire.

Cultivating interaction among English Language Learners (ELLs) and their non-ELL peers remains a desirable, yet often elusive, goal. While existing literature documents the challenges of ELL/non-ELL interaction and proposes strategies for overcoming them, there is little research examining concrete episodes of interaction from both the ELL and non-ELL perspectives. In response, I explore how a group of refugee and immigrant high school students (ELLs and non-ELLs) negotiated their interaction while collaboratively creating a digital video. In particular, I consider the role of the “language barrier” and how the participants interacted through and despite language. In the tradition of humanities-oriented educational research, I draw on Levinasian philosophy to reflect on the relational and ethical aspects of ELL/non-ELL interaction. Findings suggest that while language played a key role, communication obstacles tended to defy simple and strategic anticipation and resolution. Negotiation of meaning was often a creative, situated, and multidirectional process. Most importantly, interaction seemed to be ultimately about people in relationship—uncertain and at times uncomfortable, but also full of promise and opportunities for ethical response. I propose opening spaces as a new approach to ELL/non-ELL interaction that foregrounds human and ethical dimensions. Such reframing dislodges the issue from common assumptions which may unwittingly reduce ELLs to a “language problem,” and it honors the potential of participants creatively working out the interaction for themselves. By pursuing insights from both ELLs and non-ELLs, this study offers an important perspective rarely explored in the literature.

Literacy research has not yet revealed how bilingual learners develop coherent and robust theories of language. Translation, however, provides emergent bilinguals (EL students) with opportunities to develop metalinguistic awareness, which can lead to a more complete conceptual framework for thinking about language and literacy. This preliminary research study sought to formulate an instructional approach (TRANSLATE: Teaching Reading and New Strategic Language Approaches to English learners) focused on using translation to ultimately improve ELL students’ reading comprehension. Using design research methods and qualitative analytical techniques, researchers asked middle school students described as struggling readers to work collaboratively and use various strategies to translate key excerpts from their required English literature curriculum into Spanish. Analysis of students’ statements, decision making, and interaction indicated that students’ conceptual understandings about language played an important role in their learning. Students reflected on the nature of vocabulary, syntax, and the ways that different languages communicate ideas. These findings extend conversations in literacy studies concerning the unique affordances of bilingualism to increase metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness, known contributors to higher levels of reading comprehension.

Current research suggests that emotional investment is essential for helping students critically engage in learning in the English language arts classroom. Yet, scholarship on the role of emotion in literary response has been limited, focusing chiefly on considerations of the merits of personal response—a focus that reflects dominant theories of emotion as located in the individual. Tethered to the personal, emotion has been conceptualized as a peripheral part of literary engagement—as something to be ignored, leveraged, or gotten beyond in an effort to move students toward more substantial textual engagement. This paper proposes that a sociocultural theory of emotion provides a new lens for considering how emotion engages students in literature learning. In this view, emotion is in the fabric of every classroom context, manifesting as “emotional rules” that have material implications for learning. Constructed using methods from Critical Discourse Analysis, the case study outlined in this paper demonstrates how emotional rules were perceived, taken up, and even transformed by one student, Nina, in two discussion contexts—a seminar circle and a literature circle—playing a central role in the work of literature learning in each context. Our findings advance scholarship on the relationship between response and emotion by suggesting that emotion cannot simply be invited in or left out of the literature classroom in the interest of moving students toward literary engagement, but instead is already fundamentally a part of literary engagement and must be noticed, interrogated, and sometimes disrupted in the interest of expanding interpretive possibilities.

While there is consensus that dialogic teaching should involve a repertoire of teaching and learning talk patterns and approaches, authorities who enjoin teachers to engage in dialogic teaching generally characterize classroom dialogue in terms of surface features such as open questions. But dialogic teaching is not defined by discourse structure so much as by discourse function. When teachers adopt a dialogic instructional stance, they treat dialogue as a functional construct rather than structural, and classroom oracy can thrive. Our research finds that dialogic talk functions to model and support cognitive activity and inquiry and supportive classroom relations, to engage multiple voices and perspectives across time, and to animate student ideas and contributions. Employing narrative analysis and cross-episodic contingency analysis, we tell a story in three episodes about how oracy practices promote dialogic functions in a third-grade classroom. We unpack how a particular teaching exchange—one we have selected specifically for its nondialogic surface appearance—reflects dialogic teaching. Findings show how supportive epistemic and communal functions of classroom talk are more important to successful dialogic teaching and learning than are surface dialogic features. We argue it is necessary to look beyond interactional form and unpack function, uptake, and purpose in classroom discourse. There is no single set of teaching behaviors that is associated with dialogism. Rather, teachers can achieve dialogic discourse in their classrooms through attention to underlying instructional stance.

Currently, African American girls are being depicted as overly sexual, violent, or confrontational, are judged by physical features, or are invisible across mainstream media and within school classrooms. Few investigations have explored how they respond to and interpret such imposed representations. Nor, for the most part, have studies examined how girls represent themselves among a society of others pathologizing and defining who they are. This inquiry investigated self-representations in the writings of eight African American adolescent girls ages 12–17 who participated in a historically grounded literacy collaborative. Coupling sociohistorical and critical sociocultural theories, I organized and analyzed their writings through open, axial, and selective coding. Findings show that the girls wrote across platforms similar to those African American women have addressed historically, which included writing to represent self, writing to resist or counter ascribed representations, and writing toward social change. The girls wrote multiple and complex representations, which included ethnic, gender, intellectual, kinship,—sexual, individual, and community representations. These findings suggest their writings served as hybrid spaces for the girls to explore, make sense of, resist, and express different manifestations of self. The representations the girls created in their writings did not fall into static notions of culture or identity. Instead, their self-representations were socially constructed and were responsive to their lives. This study extends the extant research by offering wider views of representations from the girls’ voices, as well as a broadened historical lens to view their reading and writing with implications for how English language arts educators can reconceptualize the roles of writing in classrooms.

The following is the text of Ernest Morrell’s presidential address, delivered at the NCTE Annual Convention in Washington, DC, on November 23, 2014.

This November issue of RTE once again contains the annual “Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English.” This bibliography includes abstracts of selected empirical research studies as well as titles of other related studies and books published between June 2013 and May 2014. Abstracts are only written for research studies that employed systematic analysis of phenomena using experimental, qualitative, ethnographic, discourse analysis, literary critical, content analysis, or linguistic analysis methods. Priority is given to research most directly related to the teaching of English language arts. Citations in the “Other Related Research” sections include additional important research studies in the field, position papers from leading organizations, or comprehensive handbooks.

In this article, we reflect upon “the teacher as writer” and describe how we see this concept and movement developing. We articulate a view of the teacher-writer as empowered advocate. Using examples from our scholarship, we illustrate how this powerful idea can transform research conducted about and with teachers. Finally, we draw attention to the potential of the teacher-writer stance as a means of resistance to current reform efforts that disempower teachers.

While many adolescents in US school settings do not achieve basic levels of writing proficiency, new standards and assessments hold all students, regardless of academic performance history and language background, to higher standards for disciplinary writing. In response to calls for research that can characterize a range of adolescents’ writing experiences, this study investigated the amount and kinds of writing adolescents with different academic performance histories and language backgrounds produced in math, science, social studies, and English language arts classes in schools with local reputations of excellence. By applying categories of type and length, we analyzed the writing of 66 students from California, Kentucky, New York, and Texas: 26 English learners (L2) and 40 native English speakers (L1), of whom 19 were identified by school norms as lower performing and 21 were identified as higher performing. We found the majority of writing tasks adolescents completed did not require composing more than a paragraph. Exceptions were essays in English language arts and persuasive essays and reports in social studies—almost half of which were source-based tasks. In addition, considerable differences were noted in the rangeof genres and amount of extended writing produced among L1 writers with histories of higher performance in contrast with L1 writers with histories of lower performance and L2 writers. These findings are discussed in light of Common Core State Standards shifts and the implications they hold for content area teachers who teach adolescents with different achievement histories and language backgrounds.

While research in L2 language and literacy in academic contexts has shed light on learning language per se (e.g., students’ development of syntactic complexity), classroom situations, in which ESL students engage in English and make it meaningful to them, have received far less attention. With a sociocultural perspective, this qualitative case study examined the discursive practices of a face-to-face community college ESL classroom and of its online discussion forums. We found that the discourse in the face-to-face classroom tended to prioritize shaping students’ academic knowledge and identity, pushing aside knowledge and identities that were peer- or life-worldbased. In contrast, the online forums afforded discourses through which students displayed peer-based, life-world, and academic knowledge and identities, while negotiating responses to academic assignments. The study suggests that classroom-based online forums can provide a space for the legitimate display of students’ nonacademic discourses in the service of academic work.

Prior work in education, broadly, and in L2 education, more specifically, has documented both the difficulty and importance of integrating conversation into the language classroom, where conversation is both the means and end of language learning. Yet to be described is how the teacher plays an active role in engineering such integration and how he or she navigates a delicate balance between formal classroom talk and more casual conversation. Using the methodology of conversation analysis, I describe how one particular instructor manages to maintain an open and yet structured space that fosters connection without sacrificing control in an adult ESL classroom. In particular, I show how the balance between control and connection is achieved by embedding a conversational frame within an institutional one or reestablishing the institutional frame in the midst of talk about conversational matters. Findings of this study expand our current understanding of how learner voice may be promoted within the institutional structure of a classroom, and in particular, how conversation may be integrated into the language classroom without abandoning teacher control.

In recent decades, academic outcomes for English Language Learners (ELLs) have become a major focal point of research in English education. Much of the scholarly discourse on this topic reinforces a deficit orientation toward ELLs, constructing them as an educational “problem” rather than an asset (e.g., Crumpler, Handsfield, & Dean, 2011; Gutiérrez & Orellana, 2006; Mitchell, 2013). This article examines how ELLs at one high school in New England perceived and resisted this deficit discourse by analyzing statements these students made during public protest and personal interviews. I employ Critical Race Theory (Kubota & Lin, 2006; Ladson-Billings, 1998; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) as a framework for understanding how these students—all Black, former refugees from African countries—experienced the effects of deficit discourse in their lived experience at school and in the community. Focusing on four themes—Essentialization, Educational Deficit, Intellectual Inferiority, and Resistance—I show how students came to link deficit discourse with limited educational opportunity, and how particular schooling practices—such as language/literacy testing and academic tracking into low-level English classes—came to be seen by students as an outgrowth and reinforcement of deficit discourse. In the discussion of findings, I highlight alternative forms of representation (i.e., “counter-stories”) that were put forth by the students, and outline a number of implications of this study for teaching, research, and advocacy in English education.

This article explores how three writers in ecology understand and enact a disciplinary writing style. To accomplish this, it draws on theoretical approaches to style from sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, as well as analyses of drafts of coauthored texts and video-recorded literacy history and discourse-based interviews. This study finds that metaphor and embodied actions such as gestures are valuable sites for comparing writers’ stylistic understandings and practices. The three writers expressed broad agreement when describing the qualities of good scientific writing, using similar verbal and gestural metaphors, such as Communication as Journey and entailments of the Conduit Metaphor. Yet in discourse-based interviews, specific stylistic choices provoked conflicting preferences not only between writers but even within them over time, as they sometimes changed their minds about what they had preferred over a year earlier. These conflicting and changing views, and the writers’ arguments for them, complicate popular notions of writing style: that a particular discipline has a style uniformly shared among experts and that experts’ mastery of their own style is stable and absolute. The finding that stylistic disagreements are undergirded by similar metaphors in language and gesture highlights the ways our stylistic understandings are tied to life histories and are also deeply embodied. Working from a sociocultural perspective, I provide a richer, more complex empirical and theoretical understanding of what it means to command a particular disciplinary style.

In this issue, a group of emerging scholars take up diverse and timely questions about language ideologies, literate embodiments, and the ethically consequential relationships that come to be constructed, reflected, and contested at the scenes of written communication.

How do teachers define failure when learning to write? We don’t ask the question often enough. In this article, I attempt to offer a definition and critique of the nature and production of failure in writing classrooms and programs. I argue that the production of failure in writing assessments can create more purposeful consequences, particularly for those historically most likely to suffer “failures” in writing classrooms: students of color, multilingual students, and working-class students. Drawing upon survey and grade data from California State University, Fresno, I examine two kinds of failure produced in writing classrooms, quality-failure and labor-failure. I argue that quality-failure (associated with judging the quality of drafts) is the least useful kind of failure for writing classrooms, while labor-failure (associated with work and effort) offers better consequences for student-writers and can help articulate a more robust writing construct by including noncognitive dimensions of writing. I conclude by proposing “productive failure” as a future possibility for writing classrooms.

Editor Ellen Cushman introduces Mya Poe as the guest editor of this special issue on diversity and international writing assessment and previews the content of the issue.

Paradigms of writing instruction and of writing assessment are interconnected, and they are, or should be, affected by the sociocultural context in which they are embedded. In the case of writing assessment, the predominant context is the assessment of the writing proficiency of second- or third-language writers of English. Since the Second World War, English has taken a hold as the language of business and politics, and much of that interaction occurs between and among multiple groups who share only English as a common language. English is also dominantly the language of intellectual exchange, and English language tests are a critical component of decision-making about the movement of people from less-developed countries to countries where they can gain greater educational opportunity. English tests have great value. Everywhere in the world, English proficiency is one of the essential keys to unlock the door of educational opportunity and all that promises for an individual’s future. The assessment of writing is, then, socially and politically significant not only within a country’s internal struggles for opportunity for all through quality education, but also between nations.

This paper discusses the teaching of writing within the competing and often contradictory spaces of high-stakes testing and the practices and priorities around writing pedagogy in diverse school communities. It uses sociospatial theory to examine the “real-and-imagined” spaces (Soja, 1996) that influence and are influenced by teachers’ pedagogical priorities for writing in two linguistically diverse elementary school case studies. Methods of critical discourse analysis are used to examine rich data sets to make visible the discourses and power relations at play in the case schools. Findings show that when teachers’ practices focus on the teaching of structure and skills alongside identity building and voice, students with diverse linguistic backgrounds can produce dramatic, authoritative, and resonant texts. The paper argues that thirdspaces” (Soja, 1996) can be forged that both attend to accountability requirements and also give the necessary attention to more complex aspects of writing necessary for students from diverse and multilingual backgrounds to invest in writing as a creative and critical form of communication for participation in society and the knowledge economy.

Drawing on the literature on concepts of print and graphics in text, as well as informal observations of children, we identified eight concepts that we posit are fundamental to understanding how graphics work in text: Action (static graphics can be interpreted as representing dynamic action), Intentionality (graphics are chosen by authors to accomplish a communicative purpose within a larger text), Permanence (graphics in printed texts are permanent and do not change), Relevance (graphics and written text are related), Representation (illustrations and photographs represent objects, but do not share the same physical properties as those objects), Partiality (not everything in the written text must be represented in the graphics), Extension (some graphics provide additional information that is not present in the written text), and Importance (some information in a graphic may be more important than other information). We administered a series of tasks to tap understanding of these concepts among 60 children in grades preK to 3. Results revealed considerable variation within any given grade level in children’s acquisition of concepts of graphics; some children have acquired concepts of graphics that their peers have not. In general, more children demonstrated acquisition of a given concept at higher grade levels. All or nearly all children displayed full acquisition as follows: Action—by the end of preK; Intentionality, Permanence, and Relevance—by the end of grade 2; Representation and Partiality—by the end of grade 3. Less than half demonstrated full acquisition of the concepts of Extension and Importance even at the end of grade 3.

This article argues that an understanding of writing as translingual requires a shift to a different orientation to literacy—i.e., from autonomous and situated to negotiated. Such an orientationtreats the text as co-constructed in time and space—with parity for readers and writers in shaping the meaning and form—and thus performed rather than preconstructed, making the multimodal and multisensory dimensions of the text fully functional. Going beyond the native/nonnative and monolingual/multilingual speaker binaries, this study demonstrates that both student groups can orient themselves to such literate practices in the context of suitable pedagogical affordances. Drawing from teacher research informed by an ethnographic perspective, the study identifies four types of negotiation strategies adopted by writers to code-mesh and readers to interpret texts: envoicing, recontextualization, interaction, and entextualization. Envoicing strategies set the conditions for negotiation, as it is a consideration of voice that motivates writers to decide the extent and nature of code-meshing; recontextualization strategies prepare the ground for negotiation; interactional strategies are adopted to co-construct meaning; and entextualization strategies reveal the temporal and spatial shaping of the text to facilitate and respond to these negotiations. The analysis points to the value of a dialogical pedagogy that can further develop the negotiation strategies students already bring to the classroom.

This essay explores the lived literacy experiences of four multilingual immigrant writers in the US, showing first, how they have moved their literacy practices among multiple languages andlocations in the world, and second, how these practices have been destabilized and redefined by the social contexts they have met along the way. Aiming to unsettle the assumed durability ofliteracy practices on the move, the essay argues that multilingual literacy practices do indeed travel with writers across locations and languages, but to uncertain effect. These multilingualpractices appear to be too contingent on social dynamics to be easily accessed and deployed. Thus, even when writers migrate with fully developed multilingual repertoires—including fluency in English—they do not always experience the social mobility often promised.