In this essay, Sperling and DiPardo place their editorship in the context of key national and global currents of that time, which continue to evolve today. They argue that these currents touch on the work of English, language arts, and literacy educators, reflecting and shaping a number of phenomena: ever-new and surging cultural, social, and language diversities in our classrooms;technology’s mark on language and literacy, along with its benefits and constraints; the sometimes heavy hand of politics and policy on the day-to-day workings of the classroom; and, in sum, what it is that we’re supposed to teach and know as part of our English/language arts calling. This essay embeds itself in these issues in discussing RTE research from 2003 to 2008 and in thinking about the issues and research our field will encounter in the coming years.

While research in L2 language and literacy in academic contexts has shed light on learning language per se (e.g., students’ development of syntactic complexity), classroom situations, in which ESL students engage in English and make it meaningful to them, have received far less attention. With a sociocultural perspective, this qualitative case study examined the discursive practices of a face-to-face community college ESL classroom and of its online discussion forums. We found that the discourse in the face-to-face classroom tended to prioritize shaping students’ academic knowledge and identity, pushing aside knowledge and identities that were peer- or life-worldbased. In contrast, the online forums afforded discourses through which students displayed peer-based, life-world, and academic knowledge and identities, while negotiating responses to academic assignments. The study suggests that classroom-based online forums can provide a space for the legitimate display of students’ nonacademic discourses in the service of academic work.

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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.

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.

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Investigates how classroom communities were created to support students’ writing in two contrasting grade-10 English classrooms: one in a low-income urban school with a diverse population, one in a middle-class suburban school. Analyzes class discussions to see how they functioned in creating community. Portrays writing in both classrooms as socially situated.

Social theories of language (e.g., Vygotsky and Bakhtin) implicate instruction that promotes spoken interaction during the writing process. Such interaction is said to make explicit for students the dialogic relationship between writers and readers that underlies written text. This case study of a “prewriting” class discussion and student writing in a secondary English class suggests that, more than establishing a relationship with readers, students talk and writing invoke a complex of roles that reflect their relationships with one another, the outside world, and their texts. Speaking and writing contexts shape the different roles that students take. The setting of the study is an inner-city classroom in which students' lives bear critical connections to the outside world; such classrooms may be particularly valuable sites for studying students as complex role players in the process of learning to write. In offering a theory of roles and relationships, the study complicates current thinking about how classroom discourse in these and other settings is linked to writing.

This study provideas framework for analyzing t e multiplea spects of reader perspective in a teacher’s approacth to writing instruction. This framework is based on an examination of one teacher’s written comments on her students’ paper as well as on observations of her classroom. Analysis showed that the teacher’s perspectivaes a reader, as reflected by her written commenotsn students’ papers, differed (a) across students, especially for the two students at either end of the ability rangea; and (b) a cross writing assignmentrs, evealing differences in their difficulty but in ways not predicted by the theory underlying the assignment sequence. Groundeind the social processes of writing and reading in the context of the classroom, the framework gives researchers and teacher as way to explore reader perspective in teacher response to student writing and its influence on writing and learning to write.

Through the use of case study portraits, this article examines naturally occurring one-to-one writing conference conversations between a ninth-grade English teacher and three students in his class. Suggesting a broadened model of effective writing conference instruction, the article considers composing processes that appear to be privileged in the conference context when different students are learning to write. The focus is on the dialogic nature of markedly contrasting conversations, demonstrating that while dialogue wears many guises and while the give and take between teacher and student can be fleeting and “forgettable,” the conversational context contributes to a deliberative process critical to the process of composing. Methodology for the research on which this article is based drew on ethnographic techniques combined with discourse analysis of writing conference conversation.

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This article discusses one student's persistence in misunderstanding her teacher's written comments on her papers, even when these comments are accompanied by other response channels that serve, in part, to clarify the written comments. It presents the idea that student and teacher each bring to the written response episode a set of information, skills, and values that may or may not be shared between them, and it is the interplay of these three elements that feeds the student's reading and processing of teacher written comments and that leads to misunderstandings. This happened even for a high-achieving student in an otherwise successful classroom. An in-depth look at one student and the classroom context in which she learns to write, focusing on her grappling with her teacher's written comments, reveals the complexity of the teaching-learning process in the high school writing class.