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.

Young adults represent the most avid users of social network sites, and they are also the most concerned with their online identity management, according the Pew Internet and American Life Project (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010; Madden, 2012). These practices represent important literate activity today, as individuals who are writing online learn to negotiate interfaces, user agreements, and personal data, as well as rhetorical situations. Examining the social, technological, and structural factors that influence digital literacy practices in online environments is crucial to understanding the impact of these sites on writing practices. Applying Brooke’s (2009) concept of an “ecology of practice” to writing in digital environments, this article examines the digital literacy practices of one undergraduate student through his self-presentation strategies. In considering the roles that social network sites play in individuals’ literacy and identity practices, writing researchers and educators can better understand the literacy practices that students engage in outside of the classroom and the experiences they bring to their academic writing.

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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.

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.

Au comments on Elizabeth Dutro and Kathleen Collins's fascinating and broad-ranging review of perspectives and findings in elementary literacy research, based on an examination of roughly 7,700 titles published in NCTE journals.

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.

This article reflects on where and how empirical research, focusing particularly on college/adult writing and literate practice, has appeared over the last century in the complete runs of English Journal, College English, College Composition and Communication, Research in the Teaching of English, and Teaching English in the Two-Year College. Recounting our story of the empirical scholarship published in NCTE’s journals, we first appraise what has been meant by empirical research over the century and clarify how we define it for this article. We then frame that definition by considering how alternative discourse has regularly offered a significant counterpoint to that research. We next turn to the central theme of our reflections, the expanding scene of writing that has developed across the century. Finally, we conclude by considering emergent interests in global scholarship on writing and literate practice.

In this study we take up challenges regarding researcher positionality, representation, and the construction of difference as a launching point to reflexively analyze our own practices within aresearch project exploring multilingualism, multiliteracies, and teacher development. Our data were drawn from a teacher study group we facilitated during the first phase of a two-year study.We draw on poststructuralist understandings of discourse, power, and performativity and use elements of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to conduct a close thematic reading of two moments of discomfort in one study group meeting, and we critique our own complicity in the discursive production of difference. Further, we engage tools of process drama to theorize how we might have structured and responded to interactions differently during one of these same moments in order to address these challenges more successfully. We conclude by arguing for approaches and interpretive tools for researchers that could help to reimagine as well as respond both ethically and analytically to issues of representation in language and literacy research.

Charles Bazerman reminds us of the complexity of writing. He describes his own journey of disciplined study of writing as one that has necessarily been interdisciplinary, or more precisely, that has involved a series of different disciplinary engagements, each of which is aimed at illuminating some dimension of literate activity and its social consequences.

In this article, we examine writing in the context of new communication technologies as a kindof everyday literacy. Using an inductive approach developed from grounded theory, we analyzeda 32,000-word corpus of college students’ Instant Messaging (IM) exchanges. Through our analysis of this corpus, we identify a fifteen-item taxonomy of IM language features and frequency patterns which provide a detailed, data-rich picture of writers working within the technological and situational constraints of IM contexts to creatively inscribe into their written conversations important paralinguistic information. We argue that the written features of IM function paralinguistically to provide readers with cues as to how the writing is to be understood. By writing into the language paralinguistic cues, the participants in our study work to clarify, or more precisely disambiguate, meaning. Through a discussion of four of these features—eye dialect, slang, emoticons, and meta-markings—we suggest how the paralinguistic is inscribed in IM’s language features.

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.

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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.

This ethnographic study explored the ways in which media, particularly television, connected with English language and literacy practices among Sudanese refugees in Michigan. Three families with young children participated in this study. Data collection included participant observation, interviews, and collection of artifacts over 18 months, with a focus on television events as the units of analysis. Data analysis focused on television practices connected with literacy practices for adults and children. Results indicated that television offered important cultural connections with participants’ beliefs, values, and attitudes regarding their Sudanese heritage, the new U.S. context, and religious practices. Both adults and children believed television was an important resource for learning and recognized potential problems with too much viewing. Most significantly, analysis suggested important connections between television practices and the development of both English language abilities for all family members and the development of real-world literacy practices, especially for the children.

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.

This article illustrates the application of critical literacy (Freire & Macedo, 1987; Gutierrez, 2008; Morrell, 2007) pedagogies that draw from young people’s funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992) to actively nurture personally, authentically, and culturally caring relationships (Howard, 2002; Noddings, 1992; Valenzuela, 1999) that reflect a concern for students’ lives. Specifically, it discusses the impact of students performing autoethnographies (Alexander, 2005; Carey-Webb, 2001) “cultural narratives that build toward critical social analysis” as a means toward increasing critical self-reflection and building compassionaterelationships between youth of color with fractured collective identities. Such approaches, as I argue, can tap into youth confusion and anger in order to engage them as critical readers, writers, and oral communicators. The findings suggest that autoethnographies increased students’ knowledge of self and, upon recognizing one another’s all-too-familiar struggles, the classroom climate became more conducive to constructing a critical common identity among youth of color. In this way, the article has implications for building classroom relationships that make for more effective pedagogies engaging dispossessed, working-class children of color with culturally relevant critical literacy teaching practices.

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 issue’s guest editors indroduce the issue.

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.

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.

In this article, I present a qualitative analysis of third graders’ experiences with a unit from their district-mandated commercial reading curriculum in which the children made strong connections between a fictional account of a Depression-era farm family’s economic hardships and their own 21st century lives in a city with one of the highest childhood poverty rates in the United States. The language of the curriculum revealed class-privileged assumptions and an instrumental, competency-based approach to literacy that provided no official space for resonance between reader and text around the issue of poverty. Employing depth hermeneutics, a form of critical discourse analysis, I discuss analyses of three texts: the literature selection, the children’s written responses, and the teacher’s edition for that unit. Implications for research and practice include the importance of analyzing complex interactions between curriculum, policy, and the material realities of children’s lives; the need to hold commercial curricula accountable for recognizing and engaging the experiences of children living in poverty; and the academic and moral imperative to include the lived knowledge of students and the emotional dimensions of response in what counts as successful literacy engagement.

At universities, scholars in English studies manage what Gieryn (1999) called disciplinary boundary work (the rhetorical making and policing of boundaries that construct the discipline and its institutional formations as different from other disciplines and social formations) through categorical contrasts, including: literary criticism vs. writing studies/rhetoric; scholarship vs. creative writing; quantitative vs. qualitative research; university vs. K–12 schooling; university vs. workplace; and, of course, that most basic border of disciplinarity”disciplinary knowledge vs. everyday belief and culture. The two research reports in this issue of RTE both address college-level work in the field and both highlight interesting ways in which current theoretical and methodological developments are putting pressure on disciplinary boundaries in English studies.

Drawing from a study of one student’s literate engagements with English studies and fan fiction and related fan art over her two years in an MA program, which also reached back to the earlier writing she did for English classes and other writings before the study began, this article employs sociohistoric theory to examine the profoundly dialogic interplay of vernacular and disciplinary literate activities. Following a detailed look at the student’s extensive involvement with fan fiction, the article elaborates the trajectory of linkages between fan fiction and English studies, paying particular attention to the repurposing of literate practices across these activities, the synergies and tensions that texture such interactions, and the long-term implications they have for the production of literate practice and person. Ultimately, the article argues for increased theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical attention to the heterogeneous assemblage of literate practices and identities that may be mediating literate action and, in particular, to the role vernacular literacies can play in developing disciplinary engagement and vice versa.

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.

Elizabeth Birr Moje argues for a nuanced and reflective appraoch to the study of adolexcents’ use of digital technology.

Changing Conceptions and Uses of Computer Technologies in the Everyday: This study focused on 189 sixth and seventh graders in two large suburban schools and their use of computer technologies as part of their everyday literacy practices. We were especially interested in the students’ conceptions of computer technologies and how computer use varied across grade and reading levels. Findings showed that many students, especially sixth graders, were far less interested in computer technologies than is suggested by common conceptions. Findings also showed an important shift between sixth and seventh graders toward more interest in practices that provided social interaction or entertainment.

Based on longitudinal data from a three-year ethnographic study, this article uses discourse analytic methods to explore the literacy and social practices of three adolescent English language learners writing in an online fan fiction community. Findings suggest that through their participation in online fan-related activities, these three youth are using language and other representational resources to enact cosmopolitan identities, make transnational social connections, and experiment with new genres and formats for composing.

The editors introduce the three research studies and the Standpoints essay in this issue, all of which deal with the relations between digital technology and the development of adolescent literacy.

Beth Maloch reflects on her Alan Purves Award-winning article, which was chosen because of its demonstration of the ability of one teacher to make a difference in young students’ use of informational texts to develop complex, literate lives.

This article is an exploration of how an alternative text reflects the multiple identities of one high school Latina, focusing in particular on her religious identity. In this ethnographic case study, the author addresses three questions: 1) In what ways does literacy activity inside the school, in the form of the science scrapbook, allow for this student to construct her religious self inside as well as outside of school? 2) How is one student’s science club scrapbook a symbolic representation of the struggle between the spiritual and material worlds that she negotiates? and 3) How does this scrapbook challenge traditional notions of identity and highlight the complexity of presenting a religious self in the public domain? In describing one student’s engagement with religion via her scrapbook, the article argues for a more complex and nuanced view of religion, literacy, and identity.

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.

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.

We look forward to building on and expanding the role of RTE in shaping and disseminating research on writing, reading, literacy, literary response, and literature education.

This paper describes how one group of Euro-American, middle-class two-year-olds living in the southern US learned to form and enact locally appropriate textual intentions and literate identities as they participated in writing events. Data were collected during a nine-month ethnographic study of two-year-olds’ and adults’ interactions at a preschool writing table.

These two recipients of this year’s Alan C. Purves Award reflect on their work (reported in RTE Vol. 41, No. 3, pp. 269–303) on “A Cognitive Strategies Approach to Reading and Writing Instruction for English Language Learners in Secondary School” and the lessons they learned from their original research study as they tried to replicate the project in two additional districts outside their service area, to determine if the implications of their study would hold beyond the local context. The Alan C. Purves Award is given to the RTE article in the previous volume year judged most likely to impact educational practice

This article examines the role of intergenerational relationships in the lives of experienced poets and writers (“soldiers”) and emerging poets and writers in what the author terms Participatory Literacy Communities (PLCs). Drawing from Wenger’s (1998) concept of communities of practice, the author uses data from two examples of PLCs—Black bookstore author events and spoken-word poetry “open mics”—to complicate notions of reciprocity and mentoring in the out-ofschool literacy practices of people of African descent. Three soldiering traditions are discussed: soldiers as literacy activists and advocates, soldiers as practitioners of the craft, and soldiers as historians of the word.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 gathered during a seven-month study of the literacy practices of a group of White, working-class girls who have successfully navigated their high school’s English curriculum, this ethnography investigates (1) how gender and class influenced the girls’ uses of literacy in the classroom and (2) how the girls used texts from English class to construct gender.

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.