Despite a growing awareness among teachers of the importance of recognizing and valuing a broader range of students’ literate resources and experiences, including those that are culturally and linguistically linked, in many language arts classrooms students’ literacy practices continue to be marginalized—remaining peripheral to, if not at odds with, the central work of the classroom. This ethnographic study, featuring a sixth-grade African American girl, examined one such case of marginalization that occurred in an urban English language arts classroom during an integrated novel study unit. Drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism, the study considers how a student-authored play showcasing cultural and linguistic resources disrupted the planned curriculum and how tensions were negotiated by the teacher, student, and researcher. In spite of the student’s efforts and the teacher’s best intentions, hegemonic centripetal forces resisted and ultimately marginalized students’ literate interests and agendas in this classroom. Recommendations from this research include planning on, and for, dialogism by deliberately structuring curricula so there is both time and space for students’ literate interests, resources, and abilities.

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.

Permeable textual discussion occurs when the unofficial texts and discursive practices and personal histories that are already recognized and valued in students’ cultures are scaffolds to academically sanctioned literacies. Ideally, permeable textual discussions are safe havens where students’ identities (racial, gender, world views) are intentionally interwoven with classroom texts, and classroom communities are formed that responsively address matters of student identity. Yet the social contexts and instructional practices of academic tracking may shape how students reveal their identities during textual talk. This project examines the conditions of permeability during textual talk in tracked classrooms taught by the same teachers using the same texts. Using ethnographic methods and discourse analysis, the author examines how two tracked urban middle school language arts students of African American heritage revealed and hid their identities during textual talk and the instructional moves that precipitated textual talk.

In this article, I consider the literacy practices that emerged in an in-school elective course centered in the literacy tradition of African American women. Drawing from spatial perspectives (Leander & Sheehy, 2004), I explore what it means to consider this course an “Other space” (Foucault, 1986), as a space created without the constraints of a mandated curriculum or standardized test pressures and as a space informed by an understanding of the connections among literacies, lived experiences, and identities. Through the presentation and analysis of five vignettes, I consider how the students shaped the course to their own ends and pursued agentive literacy work resonant with the epistemologies in the literacy tradition of African American women. While I situate these contributions and literacy practices within Black feminist and postpositivist realist theories of identities, I contend their full measure cannot be understood without a look at the physical aspects of the space, the travel of texts into and out of it, and its relational and affective dimensions. I conclude with considerations for pursuing literacy pedagogies attentive to social identities and for creating ”Other spaces” within a time of standardization and testing.

Most research involving the analyses of discourses targets particular points in time or relatively short durations (i.e., one semester, one year). Failure to recognize the ways discourses operate over long periods of time limits the ability of educators and researchers to recognize the temporal nature of meaning construction. Through this longitudinal research project, I tracked discourses about literacy and schooling to document how events at multiple timescales (Lemke, 2000, 2001) converged in the literacy and schooling experiences of one student. Specifically, I asked how one African American middle-school student and members of her family drew upon and negotiated discourses related to past and ongoing experiences as well as larger social histories as they made sense of literacy and schooling. Based on data from an eight-year study, I applied grounded coding methods to identify and track discourses voiced in interview transcripts and field notes. Findings from the study suggest that discourses were taken up, challenged, modified, negotiated, and abandoned by participants across time. Participants drew on multiple, intertextual language resources within families and other social contexts to make sense of themselves and their experiences recursively as they recalled, neglected, revisited, and forgot particular stories and eventsand identified familiar social types.

In this article, the author takes a close look at the discursive ways that Black and Latina preservice teachers reconcile tensions between their racial and linguistic identities and the construction of teacher identities in the current context of preservice teacher education in the United States.Through the study of language as representative of teacher identities, the author presents a critical discourse analysis of the language and literacy practices of Black and Latina preserviceteachers “all nonstandard language and dialect speakers” across diverse contexts within and beyond the university and school setting. This examination of their literacy and language practices elucidated a move beyond marginalization and inferiority toward agency and linguistic hybridity.

This article reports findings from a qualitative study of Spanish-English code-switching “or Spanglish” among bilingual Latina/Latino sixth graders at a middle school in East Los Angeles. Analysis of the data revealed significant parallels between the skills embedded in students’ everyday use of Spanglish and the skills that they were expected to master according to California’s sixth-grade English language arts standards. In particular, students displayed an impressive adeptnessat (1) shifting voices for different audiences, and (2) communicating subtle shades of meaning. It is argued that this skillful use of Spanglish could potentially be leveraged as a resource for helping students to further cultivate related academic literacy skills. The article concludes with a discussion of specific implications for how teachers might begin to leverage Spanglish as a pedagogical resource by helping students to recognize, draw on, and extend the skills already embedded intheir everyday use of language.

This article examines how Black girlhood is constructed through fiction. The following research question guided this study: How do writers represent the heterogeneity of urban teenage girls in school-sanctioned African American young adult literature? Five popular narratives that exemplify the contemporary lives of urban African American female pre/teenage protagonists represent the data. Utilizing a Black feminist epistemological framework coupled with a complementary theory of adolescent identity development, we analyze the symbolic textual representations along with the protagonists’ decision making and situational depictions. We argue that the protagonists’ textual heterogeneity manifests across the texts through four enactments of identity: intellectual, physical, kinship, and sexual. These findings have both theoretical and practical implications for educators and researchers alike.

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.

In this article I use a double theoretical lens of Bourdieuian (1985, 1991) and Bakhtinian (1981, 1986) perspectives on social space and the dialogism of everyday literacy events to analyze and discuss a classroom literacy event. In this event, which takes place in a diversely populated classroom with a social justice language arts curriculum, four boys read aloud intertextual stories while managing the shifting power dynamics of their social hierarchies.

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The basics of child writing, as traditionally conceived, involve “neutral” conventions for organizing and encoding language. This “basic” notion of a solid foundation for child writing is itself situated in a fluid world of cultural and linguistic diversity and rapidly changing literacy practices.

In this essay, I address the problem of White racism in the classroom, proposing a way of reading racist discourse that takes into account its emotional dimensions and hence its persuasive appeal for White students.

Understandings of the ways home and school languages shape classroom dynamics and influence development, identity, and subsequent school success are important for teachers of both bilingual and African American students. This article builds a link between these complementary bodies of research by analyzing interactions in a second grade mainstream classroom in which the language development of bilingual and African American children were simultaneously relevant. We focus on two qualitatively different kinds of classroom language use: when instruction was solely in English, and when Spanish became a tool for instruction. Our findings suggest that the latter language practice subsequently marginalized the participation of English monolingual students; this especially affected the African American students in the classroom, who were interactionally delegitimized as participants in bilingual interaction despite their desire to participate in both languages. This study suggests the need to ensure that multilingualism is brought into the classroom as a resource for all students. Recognizing this need, however, necessitates interdisciplinary research that crosses the fields of second language acquisition, bilingual education, and sociolinguistics. Such disciplinary boundary crossing can usefully inform teachers and researchers looking for new understandings of language learning in contemporary classrooms.

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This study investigated a low-achieving class that featured regular discussions to gain insight into how dialogically organized instruction emerged within the context of a traditional recitation instructional setting, further complicated by settings of poverty and linguistic diversity. Dialogic discourse can happen when teachers are adept at linking and at enabling links between academic objectives and student concerns.

The overarching purpose of the study is to describe the English-reading development of Latino English learners who were members of the low reading group in a first-grade all- English classroom. Observations, interviews, multiple assessments, and case analyses were conducted.

Critical Pedagogy; Identity (Psychological) Explores the potential of hybridity for supporting critical pedagogies that seek to transform the knowledge, texts, and identities of the school curriculum. Draws on microanalyses of oral and written texts constructed by a Latina student perceived to be struggling academically. Shows the student interweaving home, school, and peer language practices to serve a variety of social and personal agendas.

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

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

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

Demonstrates ways in which three students in a multi-age, literature-based grade 3/4 classroom constructed and reconstructed their subjectivities based on demands of the social setting. Notes that each student’s participation was influenced by gender, social class, ethnicity, and the task. Suggests that interpretations of students’ interactions provide opportunities for developing a more sophisticated approach to multicultural education.

Narrates effects of a 10-week literacy project, a collaboration between Latino English-as-a-Second-Language students and at-risk Anglo counterparts in a rural high school in the upper midwest. Highlights "treasures" of their experience as they gather to read Spanish- and English-language literature, to write stories and poems, and to revise each other’s work.

The study was conducted in a classroom that used a process approach to literacy. Ten case studies examined the ability of 6th grade Hispanic bilingual students to construct meaning in dialogue journals and literature logs in first and second language. Journals and literature logs were coded and analyzed for language code (L1/L2), topic, codeswitching, sensitivity to audience, writer’s voice, spelling, and grammatical structures. Findings indicate that students were more effective in constructing meaning in dialogue journals than in literature logs. Success in the journals revealed positive self-images while failure with literature logs evoked poor self-concepts. Findings also suggest that implementation of process approaches can pose its own set of instructional problems that need to be addressed, especially when effectiveness is judged in terms of the particular students involved. For example, although the students in this study were able to write in English before having complete control of the language, their development of complex ideas and the construction of meaning suffered considerably. The length and quality of the writing also degenerated when the topic was imposed, when students found no relevance in the literacy activity, and when they were not assisted in contextualizing writing tasks in their own terms. Overall, mere exposure to standard writing conventions did not improve the students’ use of them. The practice of implementing popular instructional programs without incorporating appropriate social, cultural, and linguistic adaptations appears to be ineffective with L2 learners.

This study examines children's use of conjunctions.Three major issues are addressed: linguistic complexity, developmental differences, and ethnic differences.The subjects for the study--third, sixth, and ninth graders-were of Anglo, Black, or Hispanic ethnicity.They completed sentence fragments ending in the conjunctions and, but, because, and even though.These conjunctions can be paired, and-but and because-even though, where the second member of each pair is basically the negative of the first.The data indicate that the positive member of each pair was easier than the negative one; the complete order of difficulty for the four conjunctions was because < and < but < even though.The order of difficulty was constant across grades and ethnic groups.For all ethnic groups there was improvement in the use of conjunctions between third and ninth grade.However, the grade by which effective mastery of each conjunction was reached differed for the three ethnic groups, being in general earliest for Anglos and latest for Hispanics.

My object in the research reported here was twofold: to describe, in an exact manner, the development of structure in children's compositions; and to find out the differences in that development between the two ethnic groups which make up most of Israel's population: the Europeans, belonging to the culturally and economically privileged; and the Orientals, who are for the most part disadvantaged (Kleinberger, 1969; Adler, 1974) . There is an interesting difference of approach regarding the investigation of structure in children's speech and writing (and perhaps in other areas as well) between researchers in the United States and their colleagues in Germany and Switzerland. The Americans seem to prefer exact descriptions and comparisons; accordingly they tend to develop very detailed categories but (perhaps necessarily) restrict their research to clauses and sentences (Loban, 1963, Strickland, 1962, Evertts, 1968) . The Germans and the Swiss, on the other hand, devote much attention to the composition as a whole; but their accounts (and again, perhaps necessarily) , are of an impressionistic nature, and often rather sketchy. Exact figures are not often given; instead we get general descriptions, from which may be learned that the main direction of structural development is from total unawareness to requirements of organization normal in children aged about 4 to 7 towards ever increasing levels of orderly arrangement and advance planning during the course of elementary and secondary education (Furrer, 1948; Gausman, 1966; Hillebrand, 1965; Kupfer, 1968; Miller, 1962; Obrig, 1934; Salber, 1959; Sanner, 1964) : In my research I tried to combine these two lines of approach: the quantitative bent of the Americans, requiring precise definitions and differentiations, and the German-Swiss focus on the composition as a unified whole, to be dealt with in its totality.

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