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.

While grand claims have been made for the power of literature, there is a dearth of experimental research in English education examining the effects of reading literature—and specifically young adult literature—on students’ attitudes and moral development. Little work of any kind has been done on the efficacy of literary interventions in reducing adolescents’ rape myth acceptance. In response, this study examined the capacity of a dialogically organized, reader response–based literary unit focused on the young adult novel Speak to reduce adolescents’ rape myth acceptance. An experimental design was used with eighth-grade English language arts students in seven classes that were randomly assigned to treatment or control. Rape myth acceptance was measured using the Rape Myth Acceptance Scale (Burt, 1980) and a researcher-created scale, the Adolescent Rape Myth Scale (ARMS). Results revealed that girls had significantly lower levels of pretest rape myth acceptance than boys, that intervention significantly lowered participants’ rape myth acceptance, and that there was no backlash to treatment. Factor analysis revealed a two-component solution for the ARMS representing common rape myths; further analysis found that treatment was more effective in reducing the component She Wanted It than the component She Lied. The results demonstrate the instructional value of young adult literature, support the use of reader response–based dialogic instruction, and show it is possible to effectively address topics such as rape at the middle school level. I argue that future research should examine whether similar literary units can affect attitudinal constructs such as homophobia, tolerance of bullying, and attitudes toward disabilities. The potential marginalization of this type of literary instruction due to current educational reforms is also discussed.

English educators are contending with the proliferation of mobile devices in students’ lives, and with the imminent integration of mobile devices into classrooms. Concurrently, literacy researchers using social semiotic theories of multimodality to investigate adolescents’ digital composing have focused on screens, paying scant attention to the bodies moving with them. Responding to recent critiques of multimodality that have centered on a lack of attention to embodiment and affect, this article leverages the concept of real virtualities to avoid artificially bifurcating screen and body, and to contribute a beginning theorization of the embodied experience of composing with mobile devices, which includes feeling-histories, affective atmospheres, and the felt experience of time. The data analyzed in this article come from a 12-week enrichment course in which five adolescents composed digital narratives with iPods. The overarching analysis describes all literacy practices with mobile devices in the course, and the microanalysis, using multimodal interaction analysis, compares two students with contrasting histories of mobile device use. Findings show these students’ literacies as more body-centered than techno-centered, and evince tensions between institutionalized learning environments and adolescents’ affective, cultural histories of being mobile while engaged in literacy. Further, findings describe how the feeling of tools and semiotic material influenced the trajectories of students’ bodies and narratives. Theories of digital composition should continue expanding to account for connections between mobility and affect, and the pedagogical importance of motility. The changing nature of literacy in the milieu of mobile computing compels researchers to consider the role of the moving, feeling body in literacy with more scrutiny.

The increasing diversity of students in contemporary classrooms and the concomitant increase in large-scale testing programs highlight the importance of developing writing assessment programs that are sensitive to the challenges of assessing diverse populations. To this end, this paper provides a framework for conducting consequential validity research on large-scale writing assessment programs. It illustrates this validity model through a series of instrumental case studies drawing on the research literature conducted on writing assessment programs in Canada. We derived the cases from a systematic review of the literature published between January 2000 and December 2012 that directly examined the consequences of large-scale writing assessment on writing instruction in Canadian schools. We also conducted a systematic review of the publicly available documentation published on Canadian provincial and territorial government websites that discussed the purposes and uses of their large-scale writing assessment programs. We argue that this model of constructing consequential validity research provides researchers, test developers, and test users with a clearer, more systematic approach to examining the effects of assessment on diverse populations of students. We also argue that this model will enable the development of stronger, more integrated validity arguments.

Higher education researchers have called for systemic changes in graduate education, their concerns fueled in part by poor attrition and completion rates and dismal academic job markets.Many have recommended that universities provide writing support for doctoral students at the dissertation stage. Writing researchers have an opportunity to inform these discussions. However,more research is needed to understand how graduate students’ experiences with research writing differ across disciplines and how they experience responses to their research writing from advisors, graduate peers, and journal reviewers. This study utilizes systems theory to examine one nonnative English–speaking student writing for publication as part of an environmental sciencesdoctoral program. Data consist of field interviews, semi-structured and text-based interviews with students and program faculty, and side-by-side comparison of textual revisions. Theresults describe ways traditional notions of dissertations as individual research conflicted with collaborative writing processes in the sciences and affected how the student received responses tohis writing. Additionally, this study examines the “information flow” of feedback, identifying instances in which the student was isolated from possible feedback sources and difficulties thestudent encountered in adapting past feedback to complete novel tasks. This study points to key ways writing researchers can inform current efforts to restructure doctoral research through further systems-based explorations into students’ writing experiences and models of program design that better leverage potential sources of feedback.

Curriculum designers and literacy policymakers sometimes assume that variation in teaching practices can be minimized using scripted and standardized curriculum. While standards and common understandings can be helpful, scripted curricula ignore the fact that curriculum is an enacted practice orchestrated by individuals. While reading scholars have studied this issue, it has yet to be examined in writing studies. In a four-month ethnographic study, I examined how a kindergarten teacher interpreted scripted writing curriculum through enacted lessons. The interpretation problematizes the ideologies embedded within curricular scripts, including emphases on genre, mechanics, and printed texts. Analysis of child writing revealed a socially constructed practice in which genre, mechanics, and letters were tied to social intentions and meanings. While scripted curricula can confine teachers’ abilities to make responsive decisions, I document how the focal teacher translated curricular materials with students, thus creating space for official curriculum, teaching practices, and children’s writing to coexist. Such flexible spaces make room for both teacher and student voices in innovative and inventive writing pedagogies.

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.

Our purpose in this paper is to foreground contextual issues in studies of situated writing practices. During a year-long case study in a rural Kenyan secondary school, we applied a number of ethnographic techniques to document how 32 girls (aged 14-18 years) used local cultural and digital resources (i.e., donated digital cameras, voice recorders, and laptops with connectivity)within the context of their after-school journalism club. We take inspiration broadly from the concept of liminal spaces, which we bring together with notions of placed resources, New Literacy Studies (NLS), multiliteracies, multimodality, and identity work. We argue that the learning space of the journalism club, including its mediating digital tools, affords identities of empowerment to students’ writing and experimentation. On close examination of the transitional space of the journalism club, we see the foundational practices of situated rehearsal, appropriation, and performance of the roles and linguistic repertoires that the learners associated with competent journalists. We conclude that the club as a learning space, including its “props” and digital resources, fostered new degrees of freedom, community, equality, and creativity. We are left with questions about the characteristics of transitional learning spaces and how these might serve as fertile ground for growing competent writers in a range of educational contexts.

This paper presents a study designed from a socially situated and activity theory perspective aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of how Ph.D. students regulate their academic writing activity. Writing regulation is a complex activity of a highly situated and social nature, involving cyclical thought-action-emotion dynamics and the individual’s capacity to monitor his/her activity. The central purpose was to analyze how writing regulation takes place within the framework of an educational intervention, a seminar designed to help Ph.D. students write their first research articles. The seminar not only focused on teaching the discursive resources of disciplinary articles in psychology but also sought to develop students’ recognition of epistemic stances (ways of knowing) and identities (ways of being) of their academic and disciplinary communities. While doing this, the seminar also aimed at helping students overcome the contradictions they encountered as they constructed their identities as researchers and writers through writing. We collected data on seminar participants’ perceptions (through analyses of interviews, diaries, and in-class interaction) and practices (through analyses of successive drafts and peers’ and tutors’ text revisions). Contradictions represent a challenge for which the individual does not have a clear answer. Consequently, solutions need to be creative and often painful; that is, the individual needs to work out something qualitatively different from a mere combination of two competing forces. The unit of analysis was the “Regulation Episode,” defined as the sequences of discourse and/or action from which a contradiction may be inferred and which, in turn, lead to the implementation of innovative actions to solve. Results showed that contradictions regarding students’ conceptualizations of their texts—as artifacts-in-activity versus as end-products—and of their identities as disciplinary writers become visible through certain discursive manifestations such as “dilemmas” and “critical conflicts” (Engeström & Sannino, 2011). The development of students’ disciplinary writing identity was affected by their perceptions of peripheral participation in the disciplinary community and of contradictions between different communities. Two successful ways students resolved contradictions and regulated their writing activity were to redefine the output and consider the text as a tool to think; implementing these solutions resulted in substantial changes to drafts. These results might be used to design socioculturally oriented educational interventions and tools to help students develop as disciplinary writers.

This interpretive study provides a cross-case analysis of the literacy instruction of two first-grade teachers, with a particular focus on their grouping practices. One key finding was the way in which these teachers drew upon a district-advocated approach for instruction—an approach to guided reading articulated by Fountas and Pinnell (1996) in which students are instructed in small groups based on reading level—as a resource for their sense-making. Analysis indicated that the two teachers enacted the practice in distinct ways based on their experiences and personal characteristics. Findings further suggested that, reminiscent of research on ability groups conducted mainly in the 1970s and 1980s, instruction and materials in both classrooms were qualitatively different between lower groups and higher groups. Although we do not implicate the practice of guided reading per se, we call for closer examinations of modern manifestations of ability-grouped practices and explorations of alternatives to such practices.

The 2012 Alan C. Purves Award Committee is pleased to announce this year’s award recipient,Mary Christianakis. Her article, “Children’s Text Development: Drawing, Pictures, and Writing”(RTE Vol. 46, No. 1, August 2011), offers a compelling case for the acceptance and utilization of multiple semiotic tools (i.e., drawings, cartoons, sketches, diagrams) by older students in their writing, challenging those who consider these forms of writing development immature or inappropriate beyond the early childhood and primary classroom.

Although mounting research evidence suggests that dialogic teaching correlates with student achievement gains and with high levels of student engagement, little work in English education addresses the challenge of supporting new teachers in developing dialogically organized instructional practices. In a design-based study, we examine a curricular intervention designed to cultivate development of dialogically organized instructional practices, defined as instruction that provides students with frequent opportunities to engage with core disciplinary concepts through sustained, substantive dialogue. The curriculum invited secondary English teacher candidates to repeatedly enact dialogically organized instruction and to receive feedback from peers using video and Web 2.0-based technologies across a year-long student teaching internship. In English methods seminars, eighty-seven participants from two cohorts generated over 300 five-minute video clips, associated planning documents, transcripts, and reflections. We coded documents for student participation, evidence of planning for dialogic instruction, and classroom discourse variables associated in previous research with greater student engagement in substantive classroom interaction. We find that those who planned for dialogic instruction using dialogic tools were significantly more likely to have higher ratios of student utterances in relation to teacher utterances. The use of dialogic tools—conceptualized as those practical tools mobilized in teacher planning and practice with potential to mediate dialogically organized instruction in a given classroom situation—explained more of the variance in student participation than did any other factor. Attention to such tools may help English teacher candidates enact dialogically organized instructional practices.

This article examines the ways in which a multimodal text—a YouTube video on globalization and business—was mediated in two English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classrooms, and how these mediations shaped the instructor’s and her students’ meaning-making in specific ways. I first explore the complex multimodal discourses involved with this particular video and present my own reading of it. In addressing the instructor’s and students’ engagements with this video, I adopt a mediated discourse analysis approach to examine their classroom discourses that interact with the social circulation of a globalization discourse featured in this multimodal text. A conversation with the participating instructor, who articulates several issues including concerns about the possible politicization of her classroom if certain approaches to texts are used, is also presented and used to examine her subsequent approach with her students in the second class. I discuss the ways in which social actors take up discourses differently, and conclude by exploring the possible classroom practices that can address an increasingly multimodal curriculum.

Preview this article: Editors' Introduction: Literate Practices Are Situated, Mediated, Multisemiotic, and Embodied, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/47/1/researchintheteachingofenglish20669-1.gif

The concept of voice has long attracted the attention of teachers, but more recently has also been the focus of a growing body of research aiming to understand voice as self-representation in writing. Adopting a socio-cultural orientation to voice, studies have revealed much about how textual choices are used by readers to build images of text-authors; however, such research has been limited to contexts in which the author’s actual identity is unknown by the reader. Research has offered limited insight into how an author’s embodied self figures into readers’ voice construction, or how voice construction is connected to readers’ assessments of text—with or without knowledge of the author’s identity apart from the text. This article takes up these issues by exploring how readers’ exposure to videos of two second language (L2) student-authors influenced voice construction and evaluation of the students’ papers. Through primarily qualitative and intertextual analysis, the study concludes that voice construction, extra-textual identity, and assessment are related and interacting constructs, though these relationships are neither straightforward nor predictable. Methodological, pedagogical, and theoretical implications of this conclusion are discussed

This essay raises concerns over the future direction for educational aid designed to promote literacy in developing countries. The essay focuses on the EGRA (Early Grade Reading Assessment)initiative in Africa. At one level, this essay challenges the claims for empirical and research-based support for the EGRA. At a broader level, this essay raises questions regarding the viability ofexporting educational aid efforts to developing countries that are modeled after large-scale, highly prescriptive and mostly ineffective programs from the U.S. context. The essay argues fora reframing of educational aid that promotes research and development efforts that embrace a broadened view of what counts as literacy, a valuing of local contexts and a commitment to beguided by local expertise and problem solving capacities.

The purpose of the present study is to examine concurrent and predictive evidence used in the validation of ACCUPLACER, a purchased test used to place first-year students into writing courses at an urban, public research university devoted to science and technology education. Concurrent evidence was determined by correlations between ACCUPLACER scores and scores on two other tests designed to measure writing ability: the New Jersey Basic Skills Placement Test and the SAT Writing Section. Predictive evidence was determined by coefficients of determination between ACCUPLACER scores and end-of-semester performance measures. A longitudinal study was also conducted to investigate the grade history of students placed into first-year writing by established and new methods. When analyzed in terms of gender and ethnicity impact, ACCUPLACER failed to achieve statistically significant prediction rates for student performance. The study reveals some limits of placement testing and the problems related to it.

In this article, we share findings from our process of “reading the past, writing the future” of elementary research in NCTE’s journals. Our analysis focused on major domains of the field, including literature, writing, reading, language, and multimodal literacies, and spanned Elementary English Review, which first appeared in 1924, was renamed Elementary English in 1947, and became Language Arts in 1975; Primary Voices, which ran from 1993 to 2002; and Research in the Teaching of English (RTE), which began in 1967. Findings revealed both surprising continuities across decades as well as clear and important social and cultural shifts that influenced theory, methods, and practice in the field, emphasizing the importance of 1) recognizing the level of historical and political influences in elementary literacy research, 2) paying explicit attention to how the cultural-historical zeitgeist shapes our work as scholars, and 3) interrogating how our representations of research problems may contribute to the continuance of social and cultural inequities.

Composition theorists concerned with students’ academic writing ability have long questioned the application of voice as a standard for writing competence, and second language compositionists have suggested that English language learners may be disadvantaged by the practice of emphasizing voice in the evaluation of student writing. Despite these criticisms, however, voice continues to frequently appear as a goal in guidelines for teaching writing and on high-stakes writing assessment rubrics in the United States. Given the apparent lack of alignment between theory and practice regarding its use, more empirical research is needed to understand how teachers apply voice as a criterion in the evaluation of student writing. Researchers have used sociocultural and functionalist frameworks to analyze voice-related discursive patterns, yet we do not know how readers evaluate written texts for voice. To address this gap in research the present study asked: 1) What language features do secondary English teachers associate with voice in secondary students’ writing and how do they explain their associations? 2) How do such identified features vary across genres as well as among readers? Nineteen teachers were interviewed using a think-aloud protocol designed to illuminate their perceptions of voice in narrative and expository samples of secondary students’ writing. Results from an inductive analysis of interview transcripts suggest that participating teachers associated voice with appraisal features, such as amplified expressions of affect and judgment, that are characteristic of literary genres.

Using a sociohistoric developmental lens, this paper traces the construction of texts composed by fifth graders in an urban classroom in order to answer the following questions: How do children develop as writers in school? How do writing and drawing function in children’s texts? How do teaching practices shape children’s writing development? Ethnographic data collected in a fifthgrade classroom reveal how children used drawing to create classroom texts. Data show that drawing is not simply a developmental preface to writing. Rather, when given guided intellectual freedom, children integrate writing, drawing, and pictures in sophisticated and creative ways. The author traces children’s text development to show how schooling as an institution bounds and limits their use of their authorial prerogatives, their textual possibilities, and ultimately their developmental potential. She concludes by asserting that we must reconsider development in writing to include not only orthographic symbols, but also the wide array of communicative tools that children bring to writing. Any analysis of development that fails to include an analysis of the corresponding institutional practices and ideologies is liable to be no more than a contribution to the efficacy of that developmental model.

In this methodological and theoretical article, we address the need for more cross-case work on studies of literacy in use within different social and cultural contexts. The Cultural Practices of Literacy Study (CPLS) project has been working on a methodology for cross-case analyses that are principled in that the qualitative nature of each case, with its layers of context and interpretive meaning making by the researcher, is maintained while still allowing for data aggregation across cases. We present a model of a literacy practice that emerged from this work as one that may contribute to the work of other literacy researchers who are looking for theoretically driven ways to analyze and interpret ethnographic accounts of literacy practice on a larger scale and to answer questions about literacy practice across studies. We describe our theoretically based coding scheme, as well as the development of a large ethnographic database of literacy practices data and the technical aspects of lifting ethnographic data into a large database. We also provide a description of a pilot cross-case analysis as an example of the promise of such qualitative cross-case databases.

This case study describes how one eighth-grade student, Jon, asserted Native identities in texts as he attended a middle school in the western United States. Jon—a self-described Native American, Navajo, and Paiute with verified Native ancestry—sought to share what he called his Native culture with others in his school wherein he was the only Native American, despite his perception that schools have historically suppressed this culture. To study how the texts that Jon designed in school may have afforded and constrained the expression of Native identities, the authors collected three types of data over the course of eight months: (a) interviews from Jon and his teachers; (b) fieldnotes from classroom observations; and (c) texts that Jon designed in school. Grounded in theories of social semiotics and multimodality, the findings from this study suggest that different forms of representation afforded and constrained the expression of Jon’s desired identities in different ways due to their different physical properties, due to their historical and immediate uses in context, and due to the extent to which they fulfilled different metafunctions of communication. Recognizing the tensions and ironies associated with using some forms of representation, Jon sought to combine and use multiple representations to construct desired identities and to negate undesired ones.

In what ways can teachers incorporate young people’s home and community literacy practices into classrooms when such practices vastly differ from the teachers’ literacy experiences? How can teacher education curriculum and teaching influence teachers’ pedagogical practices? How can children’s roles be pedagogically reframed and become meaningful strengths in classrooms? Grounded in these interrelated research questions, this article documents some of the influences of Freirean culture circle as an approach to inservice teacher education on the ways in which two Head Start teachers and a teacher educator negotiated and navigated within and across home and school literacy practices, co-creating a curriculum based on generative themes and making early education meaningful to children from multiple backgrounds. Further, it proposes that conducting extensive ethnographic studies is not a prerequisite to creating pedagogical spaces that honor children’s home literacy practices and cultural legacies. Findings indicate that as teachers seek to build on young children’s language and literacy strengths, it is pedagogically beneficial to engage in documenting glimpses of home literacy practices within and across contexts while simultaneously challenging and (re)positioning ethnocentric definitions of literacy by engaging young children as authentic curriculum designers.

In response to growing concerns among faculty regarding the lack of attention to the bilingual student population in our pre-service teacher education program, the authors engaged in a shared self-study of the process of revising and implementing a secondary English methods course with explicit attention to the special needs of bilingual/bicultural learners. The paper describes how the second author, an English educator, with support from the first author, a mentor/colleague in bilingual education, identified and negotiated tensions and dilemmas that arose in a process of curricular transformation toward culturally and linguistically responsive teacher education practice. The study highlights several points of disjuncture, or critical turning points, experienced by the English educator and the ways in which she navigated the contradictions that resulted at these points of disjuncture through conversation with her mentor. Our documentation and articulation of this process may assist content area teacher educators in negotiating new knowledge and creating strategies for managing the dilemmas in practice that arise in the design and implementation of revised course curricula aimed at supporting culturally and linguistically diverse learners.

David E. Kirkland argues that our understanding of literate practice in relation to space needs to be radically reworked to account for new digital dimensions that are dispersed, discontinuous, and yet deeply woven into everyday and institutional worlds. His account highlights the way these digital spaces pepper the official landscape of schooling, fracturing the dominance of official discourse as students’ diverse linguistic, literate, and semiotic practices infuse this complex composite space.

This study explored how voice developed in the English writing of 57 Chinese teachers of English who participated in a three-week writing workshop during a summer institute in a large, urban school district in southeastern China. Teachers from grades 3 through 12 wrote daily in English in a workshop environment. Primary data sources were pre- and post-workshop writing samples. Supporting data included various teacher writings completed in the course of the workshop, daily written reflections, a final essay exam, anonymous course evaluations, and biographical and professional surveys. The pre- and post-workshop writing samples were assessed using the 6 + 1 Trait® analytical model of scoring writing (Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, 2006). Scoring showed that the teachers’ writing improved significantly in the course of the institute, but the greatest gain was made in the trait of “voice””the distinctive, individual way in which a writer speaks to a reader. This finding will be considered in light of the current direction of educational reform in China and of current debates over the value of teaching voice in diverse writing contexts. The study had implications for the teaching of writing to English language learners and for the professional development of teachers of writing, including those who teach English as a Foreign Language.

This study examines discussions of model papers in a high school Advanced Placement English classroom where students were preparing for a high-stakes writing assessment. Much of the current research on talk about writing in various contexts such as classroom discourse, teacher-student writing conferences, and peer tutoring has emphasized the social and constructive nature of instructional discourse. Building on this work, the present study explored how talk about writing also takes on a performative function, as speakers accent or point to the features of the context that are most significant ideologically. Informed by perspectives on the emergent and mediated nature of discourse, this study found that the participants used ventriloquation to voice the aspects of the essays that they considered to be most important, and that these significant chunks were often aphorisms about the test essay. The teacher frequently ventriloquated raters, while the students often ventriloquated themselves or the teacher. The significance of ventriloquation is not just that it helps to mediate the generic conventions of timed student essays; it also mediates social positioning by helping the speakers to present themselves and others in flexible ways. This study also raises questions about the ways that ventriloquation can limit the ways that students view academic writing.

This teacher-researcher study explored the manner in which students created video compositions in a secondary English language arts media studies program. The study found that video composition is a complex, recursive process that allows for sequential multimodal representation of thoughts and ideas. Four areas are addressed: video allows for the expansion of compositional choices, demonstrates the verisimilitude of students’ initial concept to videotaped image, highlights the visuality in students’ re-presentations of ideas, and provides research methodological considerations.

Teachers and students often express an aversion to poetry based on their experiences with printbased poetry texts that typically dominate school curricula. Given this challenge and the potential affordances of new and multimodal technologies, we investigate how preservice and inservice teachers enrolled in a new literacies master’s course began to interpret poetry multimodally, through PowerPoint.

This study was designed to investigate 19 preservice and practicing teachers’ conceptions of the role of new technologies in literacy education. The study documented how these conceptions, as well as my own, evolved over time and impacted the content and curriculum of a university course.

This case study closely examines how John (a former student of mine, age eight, second grade)composed during an informal writing group at school. Using qualitative research methods, I found that John selectively took up conventions, characters, story grammars, themes, and motifs from video games, television, Web pages, and comics.

This study was conducted by members of a site of the California Writing Project in partnership with a large, urban, low-SES school district where 93% of the students speak English as a second language and 69% are designated Limited English Proficient.

While peer review is a common practice in college composition courses, there is little consistency in approach and effectiveness within the field, owing in part to the dearth of empirical research that investigates peer-review processes. This study is designed to shed light on what a peer reviewer actually reads and attends to while providing peer-review feedback.

Preeminent scholar David Olson opens this symposium with a reflection on the decades-long debate concerning the relationship between written and oral discourse. His essay is followed by a series of responses by leading literacy researchers, including David Bloome, Anne Haas Dyson, James Paul Gee, Martin Nystrand, Victoria Purcell-Gates, and Gordon Wells. The symposium concludes with a further essay by Professor Olson, in which he offers his reflections on these scholars’ comments and looks to the continuing conversation.

Drawing on data from a multi-year digital storytelling project, this comparative case study offers portraits of two emerging authors”one a child and the other a young adult”who used multiple media and modes to articulate pivotal moments in their lives and reflect on life trajectories. The conceptual framework blends recent scholarship on narrative, identity, and performance, with an eye towards fostering agency. These cases demonstrate how digital storytelling, in combination with supportive social relationships and opportunities for participation in a community based organization, provided powerful means and motivation for forming and giving voice to agentive selves.

In literacy and composition studies, efforts to develop data-driven theories of disciplinary writing expertise and of writers’ developmental processes in joining specific discourse communities have so far been limited. This case study, of one writer’s experiences as an undergraduate history major, parses the multiple knowledge domains comprising disciplinary writing expertise and compares his beginning and later work for signs of developmental progress. A conceptual model of five knowledge domains writers must draw upon—discourse-community knowledge, subjectmatter knowledge, genre knowledge, rhetorical knowledge, and writing-process knowledge—is applied to the data both for analysis of the case and for exploring the usefulness of the conceptual model for further empirical and theoretical work. What results is a fuller depiction of the complexities of gaining expertise in any given discourse community, as well as an indication of the importance of educators across all disciplines considering the multi-dimensional and developmental nature of their curricula for building literacy skills.

Quantitative analyses using CLASS 3.0 software and qualitative discourse analyses were conducted of the instructional and institutional effects of tracking in high- and low-track American literature classes taught by the same teacher, a participant in a national study of the effects of dialogic classroom discourse patterns on student achievement. The quantitative analyses of class activities and discourse patterns revealed somewhat different amounts and kinds of dialogic discourse in the two classes, but could not account for much of the difference in achievement between the two groups. A more detailed qualitative analysis of teacher interviews and classroom discourse, using discourse analysis to look at both how the classroom discourse positioned students vis-à-vis course content, and how students in the two tracks were characterized by the teacher, showed how instruction was influenced by the teacher’s cultural models of students’ institutional identities. The teacher’s identification with the high-track students aided her in enacting a curriculum that was more academically challenging and more coherent, both intertextually and culturally. These analyses suggest that institutional and instructional effects of tracking are inextricably interwoven where the teacher’s conceptions of students’ needs and abilities constrain the level of instruction and the coherence of the curriculum.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 explores ways in which adults discuss literature (Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street) in two different settings, a traditional English seminar and an English education course designed to function as a book club. The differences described suggest tensions between the theoretical orientations and pedagogical practices of university departments of English and English education.

Researchers are freer now than ever before to pursue a wide variety of research questions approached from diverse theoretical perspectives through the use of many different research tools. The cost of this freedom is the necessity to outline theoretical frameworks for study and to explain how that theory informs the tools of research. The studies in this issue of RTE serve as models of the methodological clarity and rigor that are now required in scholarly research.

Diane Stephens prepared the following talk for the 2000 NCTE Conference in Milwaukee 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 the practice of others. In her talk Stephens considers the doubts she has had about the design of the award winning study, focusing especially on a researcher’s obligation to help the teachers with whom the researcher is working, even at the risk of jeopardizing a study’s design. Stephens traces the way that her engagement with that question has led to her current professional commitments.

This study describes some of the tensions and challenges that 9 student teachers faced as they attempted to apply theoretical tools or principles for teaching middle and secondary school English to the realities of practice. Several contexts or activity settings both shaped and complicated the appropriation process, including undergraduate experiences with and prior beliefs about English as a school subject, the preservice methods courses, field work prior to student teaching, and the classroom context for student teaching. To describe the socialization the student teachers experienced that mediated their appropriation of the principles of instructional scaffolding, we identified three modes of participation in teaching middle and secondary school English. For some, teaching included both the learning of classroom routines as well as reflective practice, that is, a theory-based consideration of instructional decisions; for some, teaching was a process of procedural display in that they were absorbed primarily in enacting lessons that worked for themselves and for their students, making it difficult for them to consider the principles underlying their instructional decisions; and for some, learning to teach was a matter of mastering routines, that is, adopting, without adaptation, curricular and instructional practices without concern for students’ understandings or for instructional principles espoused by the teacher education program. The data suggest that the alignment of various activity settings supported the appropriation of teaching tools and a reflective stance toward teaching and learning. On the other hand, when activity settings worked at cross-purposes with one another, they created obstacles for the appropriation of theoretical and practical tools emphasized at the university. This study suggests the importance of understanding the kinds of relationships that student teachers develop within each setting and how social settings get negotiated and identities get constructed as a result of personal history.

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.

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.