The 2009 Alan C. Purves Award Committee is pleased to announce this years recipient, Rebecca Black, for “Online Fan Fiction, Global Identities, and Imagination,” which appeared in the May 2009 issue of Research in the Teaching of English.

The ethics and efficacy of explicitly teaching disciplinary discourse conventions to undergraduate students has been hotly debated. This quasi-experimental study seeks to contribute to these debates by focusing on the conventional special topoi of literary analysis”conventions that previous Writing in the Disciplines (WID) research indicates are customarily tacitly imparted to literature students. We compare student writing and questionnaires from seven sections of Writing about Literature providing explicit instruction in these disciplinary conventions to those from nine sections taught using traditional methods. We examine whether explicit instruction in disciplinary conventions helps students produce rhetorically effective discourse, whether English professors prefer student discourse that uses these conventions, and whether explicit instruction in disciplinary conventions hampers student expression, enjoyment, and engagement. Five English professors who rated the student essays gave higher ratings to essays that engaged the special topoi of their discipline. Furthermore, they significantly preferred the essays written by students who had received explicit instruction in these topoi. Meanwhile, students who received explicit instruction in the special topoi of literary analysis indicated comparable, often higher levels, of engagement, enjoyment, and perceived opportunities for self-expression to those students who experienced the course’s traditional pedagogy. These findings suggest several implications for WID instruction and research relating to student and faculty professionalization in higher education.

The committee reviews important research works in the teaching of English that have been published in the last year. Committee members include Richard Beach, Martha Bigelow, Martine Braaksma, Deborah Dillon, Jessie Dockter, Lee Galda, Lori Helman, Tanja Janssen, Karen Jorgensen, Richa Kapoor, Lauren Liang, Bic Ngo, David O’Brien, Mistilina Sato, and Cassie Scharber.

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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 four-year longitudinal study examines the transitions of an early-career teacher from her completion of a graduate program with English certification (grades 7-12) into teaching literature in an urban high school. Our central question was how Beth’s pedagogical knowledge was shaped over time by her consistent efforts to enact two key principles: (1) the centrality of students’ meaning making and (2) the need to maintain high academic expectation for all students. The tensions that resulted from her department’s stances toward these principles led to consequential transitions (Beach, 1999, 2003) for Beth’s learning and development. An activity-theoretical analysis showed that over time Beth’s development was shaped by the values, experiences, and practices of other teachers in her immediate professional communities and in contexts external to the department. Rather than relying on a single activity setting, Beth’s pedagogical knowledge and practices developed out of an interweaving of conceptual and practical tools based on the constructivist principles of her teacher education program, her deepening knowledge of English studies, her students’ learning, her enactment of new teaching practices, and her involvement in this longitudinal research project. This study raises questions regarding stage theories of teacher learning and development, suggests a horizontal notion of teacher development grounded in sociocultural theory, and provides evidence for the positive and lasting effects of teacher education and reflective practice.

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.

The 2008 Alan C. Purves Award Committee is pleased to announce this year’s recipient, Beth Maloch, for “Beyond Exposure: The Uses of Information Texts in a Second Grade Classroom,” which appeared in the February 2008 issue of Research in the Teaching of English (pp. 315-362). Here the committee discusses the importance of Maloch’s work and its implications for teaching and future research.

The RTE editors introduce the articles in Volume 43, Number 3.

Anne Ruggles Gere and Daniel Berebitsky take the No Child Left Behind legislation as their starting point to review relevant literature on teacher quality. They document what is becoming an increasingly disturbing pattern: discrepancies in the distribution of highly qualified teachers with the most experienced teachers being the least likely to work with students from diverse social and economic backgrounds.

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.

The year-long case study described in this article examined the transactions between a sixth grade social studies teacher, Mrs. O’Reilly, and a struggling reader within her classroom, Sarah, in relation to the reading-task demands of their classroom. Findings indicated that Mrs. O’Reilly’s transactions with Sarah were influenced by a cognitive, print-centric view of reading and the identity she created for Sarah based on that view of reading. Sarah’s transactions with the reading task demands were influenced by how she identified herself as a reader and her goal to prevent her peers from seeing her as a poor reader. The findings from this study suggest that teachers and researchers need to find ways to identify and be responsive to the role of identity in the classroom.

Teachers who have participated in Summer Institutes of the National Writing Project (NWP) have often claimed “it changed my life.” What do teachers mean when they say this? What does it mean to “transform” in a professional development setting, and what might researchers and professional development providers gain from an understanding of teacher transformation as a kind of teacher learning?

Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English Richard Beach, Martha Bigelow, Martine Braaksma, Deborah Dillon, Jessie Dockter, Lee Galda, Lori Helman, Tanja Janssen, Karen Jorgensen, Julie Kalnin, Lauren Liang, Bic Ngo, David O’Brien, Mistilina Sato, and Cassandra Scharber; Richard Beach et al. reviews important research publications in the teaching of English.

Trickster tales, with their teachings on how to behave in the world, are a powerful means for transmitting social knowledge and cultural mores to children. In this study we compared two approaches to teaching fourth-grade students to write trickster tales. Although both instructional methods incorporated aspects of the writing process approach, only the developmentally based method took into account students’ expected developmental growth patterns in narrative composition.

This article explores a third-grade teacher’s use of critical writing pedagogy to encourage students’ exploration of issues that were important in their lives from personal as well as social perspectives.

In this At Last essay, Susan Lytle addresses issues of teacher research, work that is shaped by and that shapes the complexity of teachers’ knowledge and learning, and is based on the accumulation of robust and meaningful experiences leading to classroom expertise. Assuring her readers that teacher research is alive and well, even in the current politically charged atmosphere of scripted instruction and curriculum-driving mandated testing, Lytle presents the case for teachers’ contributions to our understandings about classrooms and teachers’ own understandings about how to make classrooms, teaching, and learning better.

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine the uses of informational texts within an ethnically diverse, second grade classroom and how the teacher carefully scaffolded students’ developing understandings about these texts. A community of practice theoretical framework was employed to better understand the ways in which informational texts were embedded within the larger classroom community (Lave&Wenger, 1991).

The committee reviews important research works in the teaching of English that have been published in the last year. Committee members include Richard Beach, Martha Bigelow, Deborah Dillon, Lee Galda, Lori Helman, Julie Kalnin, Cynthia Lewis, David O’Brien and Mistilina Sato, Karen Jorgensen, Lauren Liang, Gert Rijlaarsdam, and Tanja Janssen.

This study offers an alternative to traditional notions of scaffolding for reading comprehension by tracing the evolution of a fifth-grade small group literature conversation in which the teacher sought to displace himself as “primary knower” (Berry, 1981) in the conversation. The study examines how the teacher shared evaluation with his students even when they sought to reposition him as primary knower.

The 2006 Alan C. Purves Award Committee is pleased to announce this year’s recipients’ Sarah Warshauer Freedman, Verda Delp, and Suzanne Mills Crawford, for Teaching English in Untracked Classrooms (which appeared in the August, 2005 issue of Research in the Teaching of English, pp. 62-126). Here, the committee discusses the implications of this work for guiding important reforms in educational practice.

This issue of Research in the Teaching of English offers an array of perspectives that, like the discipline of English language arts itself, hit some recurrent notes but tend toward a kind of choral complexity.

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The two lead recipients of this year’s Purves Award reflect on their work on Teaching English in Untracked Classrooms (2005) and look to the conceptual horizons of their ongoing work.

The committee reviews important research works in the teaching of English that have been published in the last year. Committee members include Richard Beach, Martha Bigelow, Deborah Dillon, Lee Galda, Lori Helman, Julie Shalhope Kalnin, Cynthia Lewis, and David O’Brien, Karen Jorgensen Lauren Liang, Gert Rijlaarsdam, and Tanja Janssen.

This article employs the concept of intersubjectivity to analyze developments in and discrepancies between students’ understandings of criteria for effective writing and the criteria of their teacher. It reports on a study that employed qualitative methods of interview and classroom observation in conjunction with analysis of students’ writing and the teacher’s feedback on their writing to explore the struggles of students learning the “genre of power” (Lemke, 1988, p. 89) of the literary analysis essay. The greatest challenges for the students in this study occurred for those whose goals and expectations related to this high-stakes genre of writing were not based on the same taken-for-granted assumptions about context and purpose as were their teacher’s. The article concludes by discussing teachers’ professional responsibility to negotiate shared goals for literacy with their students.

In these pages we once again witness the complexity of the teaching-learning process”in elaborately woven webs of instructional talk, in teachers’ and students’ stumbling attempts to reach shared understandings, in the difficult task of assessing what students have already mastered, and in our efforts to develop insights into the needs of diverse learners.

Members of the Alan C. Purves Award Committee introduce the winner of the award for Volume 39 of Research in the Teaching of English, Mollie Blackburn. Her winning article is entitled “Disrupting Dichotomies for Social Change: A Review of, Critique of, and Complement to Current Educational Literacy Scholarship on Gender”; it was published in May 2005.

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The committee reviews important research works in the teaching of English that have been published in the last year. Committee members include Richard Beach, Martha Bigelow, Peggy DeLapp, Deborah Dillon, Lee Galda, Lori Helman, Julie Kalnin, Timothy Lensmire, and David O’Brien, Karen Jorgensen, Lauren Liang, Gert Rijlaarsdam, and Tanja Janssen.

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A successful collaboration resulted in a researcher and a teacher linking professional development with change in small-group reading instruction and student achievement.

This teacher-research study examines the roles of talk and metaphorical representation in the construction of personal and social literary interpretation.

The committee reviews important research works in the teaching of English that have been published in the last year. Committee members include Richard Beach, Peggy DeLapp, Lee Galda, Lori Helman, Timothy Lensmire, and David O’Brien, Gert Rijlaarsdam, and Tanja Janssen.

Drawing on data gathered during a fourteen-month study of reading practices among poor and working-class girls, this essay explores the challenges of creating a responsive and critical reading pedagogy across boundaries of class. Set largely in a summer and after-school reading program for pre-teen girls, the study addressed the question of how a pedagogy centered around literature might accord the possibility for girls to read, speak, and value in more than one class-specific voice. The complexities of creating such a critical reading project are explored through narratives that chronicle the interplay of the material, the psychological, and the discursive in girls’ textual preferences and literary responses. Assuming the dual voice of teacher and ethnographer, the author argues for a new poetics of inquiry that can convey the nuanced complexities of reading, voice, and psychological experience among girls growing up in working-poor America.

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.

The question of whether written genres can be learned through explicit teaching or can only be acquired implicitly through writing in authentic contexts remains unanswered. The question is complicated by the different parameters associated with teaching genre to first- or second-language learners, to children or adults, in settings in which the genre is authentically used or in settings (such as writing classes) in which genre learning is decontextualized. Quantitative studies of teaching genre offer mixed results, but in particular, there are no control-group studies of first-language adults. In this paper, we report research on teaching the genre of the laboratory report to first-language university students in biology labs. In this posttest-only control-group study, the treatment was the use of LabWrite, online instructional materials for teaching the lab report. We hypothesized that the treatment group would be more effective in: (1) learning the scientific concept of the lab, and (2) learning to apply scientific reasoning. Results of holistic scoring of lab reports for hypothesis 1 and primary-trait scoring for hypothesis 2 showed that the lab reports of the LabWrite students were rated as significantly higher than those of the control group. A third hypothesis, that students using LabWrite would develop a significantly more positive attitude toward writing lab reports, was also supported. These findings suggest that first-language adults can learn genre through explicit teaching in a context of authentic use of the genre.

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?

In 1986, while still at Harvard, I started teaching summer school at the Bread Loaf School of English, the graduate program in English of Middlebury College. Bread Loaf offers courses in literature, theater, and writing—where I fit in. I came to that job with a background in applied linguistics and cognitive development, but not in literature, and so started out feeling professionally marginal. But appropriation of interests and understandings from repeated participation in a powerful environment has its effects, and I’m now increasingly intrigued by differences in perspectives on texts between language research and the humanities. This is my first attempt to consider them together.

The authors gave the following talk at the 2003 NCTE Annual Convention in San Francisco 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 classroom practice. Writing as lead author, Pauline Harris traces the history of her interest in children’s intertextuality through her life as a classroom teacher, her doctoral studies in the Bay Area, and her recent work with colleagues Jillian Trezise and W. N. Winser in Australia. As they describe the impetus behind their award-winning article and suggest directions for future research, the authors challenge classroom teachers to understand children’s intertextuality as a source of pleasure and complexity, and as a guide to appropriate and engaging instruction.

English departments are increasingly under pressure to offer writing courses online, but research that informs effective pedagogies—including effective ways to respond to students’ drafts—is still limited.

Though high-stakes testing currently dominates educational policy, few studies examine the consequences of such testing for the teaching and learning of literature in secondary English classrooms. This study takes a multi-layered approach to specify how a high-stakes exam positioned students as readers of literary texts.

The committee reviews important research works in the teaching of English that have been published in the last year. Committee members include Richard Beach, Peggy DeLapp, Deborah Dillon, Lee Galda, Timothy Lensmire, Lauren Liang, David O’Brien, and Constance Walker.

This article examines three English teachers’ conceptions of their students’ literary understandings. I focus on the teachers’ conceptualizations of the act of reading in relation to literary understanding and how they responded to videotape artifacts of their students reading literature.

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Twice a year, in the May and November issues, RTE publishes a selected bibliography of recent research in the teaching of English.

We gratefully acknowledge the time and effort of the following colleagues in reviewing manuscripts considered for Research in the Teaching of English.