Research in the Teaching of English

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May 2025

  1. Argument as Architecture: Constructing an Alternative K–12 Writing Paradigm for Collective Civic Futures
    Abstract

    Argumentation, one of the foundational pillars of writing instruction in K–12 schools, is consistently framed in literacy policy, curriculum, and assessment as a crucial skill youth need to participate in democratic deliberation. Yet the normative emphases in argument discourse on individual subjectivity, binary analysis, and competitive social scarcity stifle the development of the solidarity and relationality needed to counter rancorous political discord and to build equitable civic futures. In this conceptual essay, the authors offer a reimagined paradigm and practice of argument that fosters empathetic thinking and mutuality, moving away from the conceptualization of argument as solitary edifice and toward a vision of argument as collective architecture. Drawing upon lessons from global communicative traditions and recent turns in literacy scholarship toward participatory design, multimodality, and critical speculation, the authors provide five guiding principles for the Argument Writing as Architecture (AWA) framework, share vignettes from classroom and community learning spaces to illustrate its utility, and propose strategies for its implementation in K–12 classrooms.

    doi:10.58680/rte2025594473

February 2025

  1. Differentiating Appreciation of Characterization in Print, Graphic Novel, and Movie Versions of Children’s Literature: Multimodal Analyses to Develop Students’ Interpretive Stance
    Abstract

    Language arts and literacy curricula around the world have been advocating for the teaching and learning of literature in multiple forms. However, apparently in much of classroom practice, little attention has been given to distinguishing the literary distinctiveness of multiple forms of ostensibly the same story. Developing an appreciation of the distinctive interpretive possibilities of multi-version literary narratives may be facilitated by semiotic analyses that indicate how the deployment of image, paralanguage, and language resources have been designed to orient the audience to particular interpretive options. Understanding how to analyze texts to determine such orientations is a crucial aspect of critical literacy. In this paper, we draw on systemic functional linguistics and its extension to the description of the meaning-making resources of image and paralanguage to focus on how differences in characterization are achieved in three versions of the story of Coraline.

    doi:10.58680/rte2025593285

November 2024

  1. Black Diasporic Frameworks with Implications for Black Immigrant Youth Research: A Theoretical Essay
    Abstract

    The immigration of Black people from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America to the United States can be described as a phenomenon that is not of recent origin (Konadu-Agyeman, Takyi, & Arthur, 2006). The review of legislative policies at the height of the Civil Rights movement in 1965 and the subsequent abolition of restrictive immigration laws made it possible for immigration from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America to occur (Hamilton, 2020; Konadu-Agyeman & Takyi, 2006). Cultural practices, epistemologies, ontologies, semiotic resources, and axiologies have been introduced into these new environments as a result of these waves of Black migration (Amoako, 2006; Benson, 2006; Bryce-Laporte, 1972; Dei 2005; N’Diaye & N’Diaye, 2006; Shaw-Taylor & Tuch, 2007; Watson, 2020). This essay proposes the use of theoretical and conceptual frameworks for understanding such phenomena. Black immigrant youth cultural practices and values are explored through Africana phenomenological theoretical perspectives and Sankofa and Tete wo bi kyere conceptual frameworks. This article highlights the importance of studying the experiences of Black immigrant youth through the use of African frameworks as crucial tools for investigating and understand the experiences of Black immigrant youth.

    doi:10.58680/rte2024592237

May 2023

  1. Collaborative Translanguaging and Transmodal Literacies: Learning the Language of Science in a Dual-Language Classroom
    Abstract

    Research has shown the benefits of peer interaction to scaffold learning of disciplinary literacies. We extend knowledge in this area to examine peer interaction and the affordances it creates when emergent bilinguals engage with multimodal texts in disciplines to make meaning. Using discourse analysis of the interactions of a small group of third graders carrying out a project in science class, we explored how four emergent bilinguals collaborated to design, produce, and distribute traditional and alternative texts. We found that translanguaging and transmodal collaborative structures support learning processes and comprehension to make sense of and contextualize disciplinary knowledge. A dynamic and recursive translanguaging pattern emerges in which the introduction and contextualization of knowledge happens in Spanish, the interaction occurs mainly in English, and the creation is in both English and Spanish. We discuss the affordances of these collaborative structures for supporting students in science and promoting Spanish and student bilingualism.

    doi:10.58680/rte202332472

February 2023

  1. In Dialogue: Mapping Our Truths—Envisioning the Future of Multimodal Research for Racial Justice
    Abstract

    With funding from the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Marva Cappello, Jennifer D. Turner, and Angela M. Wiseman convened a group of critical multimodal scholars in April 2022 to initiate a national agenda that prioritizes the use of visual and multimodal methodologies to promote educational equity and racial justice for youth of color. Our conference gathering included Reka Barton, Darielle Blevins, Justin Coles, Autumn A. Griffin, Stephanie P. Jones, Alicia Rusoja, Amy Stornaiuolo, Claudine Taaffe, Tran Templeton, Vivek Vellanki, and Angie Zapata. The dialogue presented in this article centers around a collaboratively composed image (see ) created three months after our initial convening. Participants from the conference chose an image that reflected our time together and represented our hopes and dreams moving forward. Inspired by kitchen-table talk methodology (), we share our ideas through images and text reflecting on how critical visual and multimodal methodologies facilitate access, equity, and hope in education and educational research.

    doi:10.58680/rte202332356
  2. Editors’ Introduction: Multimodal Research for Racial Justice
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Editors’ Introduction: Multimodal Research for Racial Justice, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/57/3/researchintheteachingofenglish32352-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/rte202332352

February 2022

  1. Generating New Narratives: Examining Youths’ Multiliteracies Practices in Youth Participatory Action Research
    Abstract

    This paper examines the multiliteracies practices () of 20 high school students who participated in a weeklong summer research institute at the start of a 6-month-long community-based youth participatory action research (YPAR) initiative. Data analyzed included 20 digital multimodal compositions produced by youths, individual interviews with youths, and observations of youths’ participation in the YPAR initiative. Data analysis utilized theories of multiliteracies practices () and culturally sustaining pedagogies () enacted across contexts of YPAR (). Findings contribute new insights about students’ multiliteracies practices in YPAR in two ways. First, we examine how learning about research methods shifted students’ understandings of research and the role their experiences could play in YPAR. Second, we examine how students’ digital literacies practices () supported them in generating new narratives about their community in digital multimodal compositions. Finally, we consider how insights gained from our examination may support educators in developing and enacting culturally sustaining () learning contexts that build with students’ multiliteracies practices as strengths while challenging persistent educational inequities.

    doi:10.58680/rte202231637

May 2021

  1. Editors’ Introduction: Emerging Solidarities in Literacy Research
    Abstract

    Informed by Bakhtin's theorization of voice as well as cross-disciplinary studies of scaling, the authors explore how a group of young filmmakers rendered one focal immigrant student's familial history by centering speakers addressing the topic of immigration from multiple levels, thereby connecting multiple social and spatiotemporal contexts in their multimodal storytelling to illustrate the costs of dehumanizing policies. In this case study, drawing from classroom observations, student work, and interviews with both students and teachers, the authors also highlight the importance of teacher agency in creating opportunities for refugee-background students to interactively engage in the language arts classroom. Drawing from interviews, observations, and analysis of student writing, the authors construct a detailed case study of how one student writer negotiated her stance toward the discourse of literary analysis based on her own writerly identity as a creative writer, illuminating the importance of critically attending to the ideological implications of teaching discipline-specific writing.

    doi:10.58680/rte202131255
  2. Multimodal Voicing and Scale-Making in a Youth-Produced Video Documentary on Immigration
    Abstract

    This study builds on research of multimodal storytelling in educational settings by presenting a study of a youth-produced documentary on immigration. Drawing from a video documentary project in a high school class, we examine students’ representational processes of scaling in documentary storytelling, and the kinds of resources they use to construct multiple spatiotemporal contexts for understanding their experience of immigration and immigration policy. Our theoretical framework relates the concept of scale to the Bakhtinian concept of voice to consider the semiotic resources that are used to index and connect multiple social and spatiotemporal contexts in storytelling. Focusing on a documentary produced by some students in the class, we analyze how the young filmmakers used particular speaker voices (characters) and their social positioning to invoke and construct relevant scales for understanding the problem of deportation. Our analysis extends the study of scaling to multimodal texts, and the strategies that people use to represent and configure relationships among different socially stratified spaces. By conceptualizing the relations between voice and scale, this work aims to contribute to literacy learning and teaching that support young people in bringing their knowledge, experiences, and narrative resources to engage with societal structures.

    doi:10.58680/rte202131256

November 2020

  1. Multimodal Attitude in Digital Composition: Appraisal in Elementary English
    Abstract

    <p>Video making and sharing have the potential to represent attitude in powerful ways and have become everyday literacy practices for many children. Research has only recently attended to the multimodal grammars of attitudinal meaning that characterize filmic media, while providing few examples of the successful teaching of these semiotic principles to elementary students. This article reports original research conducted in two schools over two years with elementary students (ages 9 to 11 years). It examines students' application of semiotic knowledge of the appraisal framework to communicate attitudinal meanings multimodally through film. Attitudinal meanings in the appraisal framework are categorized as affect, judgment, or appreciation, and can be communicated through discourse and multimodal texts. The students learned to configure multiple modes, including speech, written text, image, gaze, facial expressions, body movement, posture, gesture, and sound, to communicate attitude in their films. The findings provide an exemplar for the teaching and analysis of students' filmmaking that applies systematic, multimodal grammars for communicating attitude. The findings are significant because interpersonal language is a major semiotic system of English, and visual texts now feature prominently in digital communication environments. </p>

    doi:10.58680/rte202031022
  2. Brown Girls Dreaming: Adolescent Black Girls’ Futuremaking through Multimodal Representations of Race, Gender, and Career Aspirations
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Brown Girls Dreaming: Adolescent Black Girls’ Futuremaking through Multimodal Representations of Race, Gender, and Career Aspirations, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/55/2/researchintheteachingofenglish31020-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/rte202031020

August 2019

  1. Metalepsis in Elementary Students’ Multimodal Narrative Representations
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Metalepsis in Elementary Students' Multimodal Narrative Representations, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/54/1/researchintheteachingofenglish30239-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/rte201930239

February 2019

  1. Mediational Modalities: Adolescents Collaboratively Interpreting Literature through Digital Multimodal Composing
    doi:10.58680/rte201930034

November 2017

  1. “She’s Definitely the Artist One”: How Learner Identities Mediate Multimodal Composing
    Abstract

    Multimodal composing can activate literacy practices and identities not typically privileged in verbocentric English classrooms, and students’ identities as particular kinds of learners (e.g.,“visual artist”) may propel—or limit—their engagement in classroom work, including in multimodal composing. Although researchers have studied the ways multimodal projects can evidence literacy learning and have argued that identity is negotiated, improvisational, and hybrid, they have offered few sustained analyses of the processes by which identities evolve during and across multimodal composing tasks. By examining how students position themselves and one another as particular kinds of learners over time, researchers can better understand the ways in which multimodal tasks help students explore new skills and roles or reify old ones. Drawing on an approach to discourse analysis from the linguistic anthropology of education, we trace the pathways of three 12th graders’ learner identities across two events as they worked in a group to compose visual responses to literary texts for their English class. We examine how one student’s robust identity as an artist emerged in tandem with the devaluing of other participants’ artist identities. Seven weeks later, these positionings led her to act as the painting’s primary author and other students to act in increasingly perfunctory ways. We call for teachers and researchers to consider how students’ identities—interacting with factors such as the teacher’s expectations for group work and the affordances of particular media and materials for collaboration—drive students’ participation in and ownership of multimodal compositions.

    doi:10.58680/rte201729377
  2. Forum: Setting a Research Agenda for Lifespan Writing Development: The Long View from Where?
    Abstract

    I am writing in response to the recent Forum essay “Taking the Long View on Writing Development,” authored by Bazerman, Applebee, Berninger, Brandt, Graham, Matsuda, Murphy, Rowe, and Schleppegrell (2017; and hereafter “The Long View”). I argue that “The Long View” was driven by the aim of identifying consensus rather than working through difference, that the principles represent commonplaces rather than a principled synthesis of research, that questions of epistemology and theory central to research agendas are essentially ignored, and that views of writing as semiotically exceptional and writing development as centered in school represent serious flaws in setting the agenda. The semiotic exceptionalism of “The Long View” represents a serious category mistake (Ryle, 1949). Taking “writing” as the unit of analysis occludes the diverse semiotic activity that necessarily shapes all textual artifacts and acts of inscription. Viewing writing as sharply distinct from orality risks reigniting Great Divide theories that had so many problematic effects on research, pedagogy, and people. Seeing school as the primary context for writing development ignores the rich roles of life outside school. In short, “The Long View” takes too narrow and problematic a view on issues of epistemology, theory, and literate lives to serve as the foundation for the critical research enterprise it aspires to conjure in our collective future. Instead, I suggest that research on the lifespan development of writing needs to begin with embodied, mediated, dialogic semiotic practice as its unit of analysis and to trace what people do, learn, and become across all the deeply entangled domains of their lives.

    doi:10.58680/rte201729380

May 2017

  1. Forum: Pedagogizing Translingual Practice: Prospects and Possibilities
    Abstract

    The notion of translingual practice has gained much currency within college composition and sociolinguistics over the last few years. Translingual practices challenge structuralist conceptualizations of language as discrete, bounded, impermeable, autonomous systems, conceptualizations that unfortunately (1) privilege linguistic codes over nonlinguistic ones, and (2) contribute to the hierarchization and separation of languages, leading some languages and their corresponding users to be valued more than others. To counter such a stance, we advocate the use of translingual pedagogy, which values the fluid communicative practices of learners who mobilize multiple semiotic resources to facilitate communication. By sharing examples from our own classrooms,we also underscore the need for teachers to recognize and expand the communicative repertoires of their students. This pedagogical shift, as we illustrate, is accompanied by an instructional commitment to develop students’ metalinguistic awareness and cultural sensitivities in order to create inclusive and equitable learning environments.

    doi:10.58680/rte201729121

February 2017

  1. Remembering Michoacán: Digital Representations of the Homeland by Immigrant Adults and Adolescents
    Abstract

    Previous research has documented the potential of digital projects for immigrant students to capitalize on their transnational knowledge. Yet, there are only limited insights on the practices and perspectives of immigrant adults in digital/multimodal composition. In this article, we explore how visual media are used by adults and adolescents as resources in the production of digital texts, and as artifacts to elicit accounts and memories. We draw from transnational approaches to theorize the role of technology in facilitating connections with students’ home countries. We use social semiotics and testimonio lenses to examine media they selected to represent their hometowns in (or nearby) the Mexican state of Michoacán. Lastly, we adopt methods of practitioner inquiry and artifactual literacy to elicit information about participants’ understandings and choices in the composition process. Our findings show that while transnational ties were relevant for all participants, their understandings about their hometowns differed across generations. Adults represented the homeland as a source of healing and miracles, while youth focused on concerns about crime and corruption. We also document the complexities of access to visual media through search engines. We show the ways family networks, travel, and media consumption shaped the composition choices students made, as well as how their current circumstances, roles, and concerns led them to share testimonios of struggle and faith. We discuss contributions to digital writing research across generations, and implications for pedagogical practices that leverage students’ transnational ties and migration histories

    doi:10.58680/rte201728976
  2. “Because I’m Smooth”: Material Intra-actions and Text Productions among Young Latino Picture Book Makers
    Abstract

    As theorization of multimodal text processes and productions continues to outpace classroom practices, research that contributes understandings of how composers are living out multimodal processes is needed. In response, we turn to thinking with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) as both a methodological and an analytic approach to understand how multimodal composing processes and products come to be. We provide strategic sketches (Leander & Boldt, 2013) focused on third graders “Efrain” and “Trinidad”, not aiming to display the data in a traditional sense, but instead to ask of ourselves, the data, and theory: What material intra-actions emerge among two young picture book makers? What social, cultural, and material worlds are performed in their final picture book productions? Thinking with theory and data was an effort to experience some of the moment-to-moment nuances of young children’s multimodal processes, to appreciate the lived social, cultural, and material realities animated in their picture books, and to develop sensitivities to the possibilities of the material turn in post-humanist studies for literacy research. The analytic questions produced point to the saliency of diverse literature as aesthetic inspirations for multimodal texts, and of improvisations with varied art tools and media as openings for multimodal processes. This paper advances previous related scholarship through strategic sketches that invite readers to experience the complexity and the cultural significance of the multimodal processes and products that emerge when classroom expectations of a proficient writer include the ability to improvise and become with diverse materials and meanings, not just to command “standardized written English.”

    doi:10.58680/rte201728977

August 2016

  1. Forum: Teaching Close Reading with Complex Texts across Content Areas
    Abstract

    The Common Core State Standards accords great importance to close reading, but offers no specific guidelines for how it can or should be taught. This essay provides a critical review of existing instructional models of close reading and addresses issues related to their implementation in content area classrooms. It shows that current models of close reading offer different ways of engaging students in their interaction with complex texts, with some focusing on reading and rereading for understanding and others providing more intensive linguistic support. It argues that effective close reading practices must attend simultaneously to all key elements involved in the complex process of reading, including the reader, the text, the task, and the context, with a special emphasis on developing students’ understanding of how language and other semiotic systems construct meaning, embed ideology, and structure discourse in genre- and discipline-specific ways. The essay demonstrates that the contention about what close reading is and how it could be implemented stems from its varied interpretations by scholars with different theoretical and epistemological beliefs about reading, language, text, literacy, and schooling. It further suggests that an awareness of the critical issues that have been raised about close reading can help teachers avoid potential pitfalls and maximize effectiveness when implementing the practice.

    doi:10.58680/rte201628687

May 2014

  1. Embodied Composition in Real Virtualities: Adolescents’ Literacy Practices and Felt Experiences Moving with Digital, Mobile Devices in School
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.58680/rte201425161

August 2013

  1. Negotiating Translingual Literacy: An Enactment
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.58680/rte201324158

May 2013

  1. Integrated Literacies in a Rural Kenyan Girls’ Secondary School Journalism Club
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.58680/rte201323632

February 2013

  1. Announcing the Alan C. Purves Award Recipient (Volume 46)
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.58680/rte201322715

November 2012

  1. The Multimodalities of Globalization: Teaching a YouTube Video in an EAP Classroom
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.58680/rte201221825

November 2011

  1. A Journey through Nine Decades of NCTE-Published Research in Elementary Literacy
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.58680/rte201118262

February 2011

  1. One Adolescent’s Construction of Native Identity in School: “Speaking with Dance and Not in Words and Writing”
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.58680/rte201113466

August 2009

  1. Standpoints: Researching and Teaching English in the Digital Dimension
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.58680/rte20097243

May 2009

  1. Writing with Visual Images: Examining the Video Composition Processes of High School Students
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.58680/rte20097073

November 2008

  1. Using Digital Media to Interpret Poetry: Spiderman Meets Walt Whitman
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.58680/rte20086774

November 2002

  1. Locating Latanya: The Situated Production of Identity Artifacts in Classroom Interaction
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.58680/rte20021770

October 1985

  1. Parallels Between New Paradigms in Science and in Reading and Literary Theories: An Essay Review
    Abstract

    This essay explores parallels between new paradigms in the sciences, particularly quantum physics, chemistry, and biology, and new paradigms in reading and literary theory, particularly a socio-psycholinguistic, semiotic, transactional view of reading and a transactional view of the literary experience. Among the major parallels emphasized are the following concepts: reality is fundamentally an organic process; there is no sharp separation between observer and observed, reader and text, reader/text and context; the whole (universe, sentence, text) is not merely the sum of parts which can be separately identified; meaning is determined through transactions between observer and observed, reader and text, reader/text and context, and among textual elements on and across various levels. When a friend first introduced me to Fritjov Capra's The Turning Point (1982), I was intrigued by what Capra describes as the paradigm emerging in fields as diverse as physics and economics, psychology and medicine. Clearly, I thought, there are direct parallels between the paradigm Capra describes and that emerging in my own field, reading theory. Seeking to better understand such parallels, I delved into other recent books that describe for the non-scientist the paradigm emerging in the sciences. First among these was Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979), a fascinating introduction to quantum physics. More recent books include Wolfs Taking the Quantum Leap (1981), Jones's Physics as Metaphor (1982), Campbell's Grammatical Man (1982), Prigogine and Stengers' Order Out of Chaos (1984), Comfort's Reality and Empathy (1984), and Briggs and Peat's Looking Glass Universe (1984). Each of these in some way contributes to an understanding of the paradigm emerging in the sciences. In the following essay, I draw from books such as these some key concepts that seem to be emerging, or rather re-emerging, from various scientific disciplines, and trace parallels between these and similar concepts that have been re-emerging in reading theory and in literary theory. This work was supported by a Fellowship from the Faculty Research and Creative Activities Fund, Western Michigan University. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 19, No. 3, October 1985

    doi:10.58680/rte198515642

January 1976

  1. Considerations of Sound in the Composing Process of Published Writers
    Abstract

    Although speech and writing constitute different modes of communication and make different demands on a communicator, there is some reason to think that the act of speaking may directly assist the act of writing. Tovatt and Miller (1967) have reported results of an experimental composition program in which each student was taught to test the patterns he writes against his ingrained oral pattern (p. 7) . Citing Alexander Pope's line The must seem an echo to the sense, Tovatt and Miller claimed that reading a passage aloud can help writers examine their work for inept phrasing or lack of clarity. Robert Zoellner (1969) and Terry Radcliffe (1972) have argued that students are often able to say aloud that which they are not able to write. Both writers suggest that speaking aloud to another student can help students discover and clarify ideas they will subsequently write about. We accept those scholars' basic claim: spoken language may help writers formulate or clarify the message they wish to communicate in writing. But we wonder if speech and writing may be related in still another way. Both of us occasionally find ourselves thinking of our writing as recorded speech, wondering how a passage will to a reader, what voice qualities volume, timbre, speed, inflection are suggested by our written language. Both of us can think of times when we were very concerned with how a written piece (one intended for a journal, not for oral presentation to a group) would be performed, how it would if delivered to a live audience. We were concerned not with sound as echo to the sense but whether the implied in writing was appropriate for the speaker-audience relationship we were trying to establish. Given our assumption that spoken language and written

    doi:10.58680/rte197620032