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Reading for Pleasure (RfP) acknowledges the importance of reader engagement and the role of the teacher as a reader of children's literature. The foundational work of the Teachers as Readers (TARs) programme successfully illustrated the impact of RfP activities on student learning. Previous studies of teachers' reader identities have shown a strong need for professional learning to boost teachers' confidence with children's literature. However, less emphasis has been placed on the adoption of RfP pedagogy within initial teacher education (ITE) to develop pre-service teachers' (PST) knowledge of children's literature, as well as their understanding of teachers as reading role models for future students. This paper analyses data from research into RfP undertaken in two ITE programmes for primary teachers informed by contrasting policies in Scotland and Australia. Though both countries aim to improve school student literacy success, the curriculum mandates differ, shaping the potential pathways available in ITE courses. It is within this context that we report on 3 years of data on PST reader knowledge collected from 300 students using survey tools adopted from the original TARs study. Emerging findings provide evidence that teacher educators need to act as circuit breakers to alter PST attitudes to reading.

This paper presents findings from a collaborative project on critical visual literacy in primary schools. In the project, we (a researcher and a teacher) implemented a series of picture book discussions with children in years 5 and 6. Our first aim was to develop the children's ability to analyse the visual images in picture books and how authors/illustrators use these, together with writing, to communicate specific ideas. The second aim was to promote a dialogic lesson in which the children would lead the talk. In the paper, I discuss the challenges we faced in reaching our aims. My data include observation notes and audio recordings of the sessions and of discussions with the children. In the analysis, I examine the roles we took on, for example, as extenders and clarifiers of the children's talk. However, unbeknown to us at the start, our two project aims turned out to be in conflict with each other. While the children enjoyed looking closely at the pictures and discussing the books' possible meanings, without repeated questions and prompts, they focused on the book as story not on how it was constructed by the author and illustrator. This required a more teacher-focused approach than what we had planned.

This paper complicates oracy by attending to moments of vibrancy and stillness in a public school classroom, where children were expected to follow particular rules that governed their bodily movement and language use. I argue that children's talk in classrooms cannot be separated from the making of meaning at the intersection of human bodies, materials and immaterial forces, including discourses of schooling and schooled literacy. To do so, I utilise teacher interviews and video-recorded observations from a second grade classroom in the Republic of Cyprus, and analyse those drawing on an understanding of talk as embodied: as occurring through bodies, as part of and in conjunction with bodily movement, regulated and regulating, and yet not fully determining what being a child-learner in a classroom means. I present findings from this analysis in three interrelated moves as I connect talk and silence to local classroom rules, to discourses of literacy and schooling that discipline the (talking) body, and to the contingency of embodied talk in a particular classroom event. ?his multilayered reading provides insights into the ways in which oracy is part of an assemblage that, among others, brings together and pulls apart teachers' and children's talk, institutional discourses, and always already vibrant bodies.

This paper examines the nature of the out-of-school writing practices of three primary-aged children aged 9-10. In particular, it explores the writing these children chose to undertake at home including 'for school' writing, completed at home. The study's findings reveal the ways in which these three, developing young writers engage and interact with writing and how this differs to writing "for school," completed at home. To better understand the implications of national surveys that reveal a causal relationship between writing for enjoyment and positive writing attainment this research sought to expose the range and versatility of the children's home and volitional writing practices. The children in this case study were not selected because they were writers but merely that they engaged with writing away from school. The study employs an ecological paradigm (Bronfenbrenner, [Bronfenbrenner, U., 1979]) to explore the participation and interaction of the children with their writing practices within the complex environment of home. The paper makes the case for teachers to be more curious about the private worlds of out-of-school text creation to better appreciate the provenance of home writing events and artefacts.

New research findings are presented in this paper, responding to a significant knowledge gap about the role of pedagogy in tackling persistent educational inequalities. The paper examines the potential of reading for pleasure (RfP) pedagogy to disrupt 'pedagogy of poverty' in low socio-economic (SES) schools and to enable children to reap the cognitive, well-being and social benefits of RfP. Children's volition and social interaction as readers are central to RfP and have been found to be particularly constrained by pedagogy common in low SES schools in the United States, Australia and England. The research examined how pedagogy for RfP was instantiated in four low SES English primary schools to understand how this potential might be realised and its effects on children's engagement with RfP. The schools were selected because they had invested in RfP, yet the study found their RfP pedagogies did not in practice support children's volition and engagement because teachers' understandings of reading focused upon proficiency. Such teachers need to reconceptualise reading as social and volitional to underpin RfP pedagogies. The paper provides new insight into the challenges of developing genuine RfP pedagogy and other pedagogies that profile volition and active engagement with learning in low SES schools.

This paper focuses on a Community of Writers creative writing project where 25 primary school pupils from lower socio-economic backgrounds took part in creative writing workshops over a 2-week period at a higher education institution. Using practitioner enquiry and discourse analysis, this paper views identity as participation in "figured worlds" and highlights the relationship between the children's creative writing outputs and their shifting identities (Holland et al., 1998). A case is made that children's authentic creative writing can be nurtured by a community that promotes intertextuality and "hybridity" (Bakhtin, 1981) as well as balancing pedagogical "structure" and "freedom" (Davies et al., 2012) in order to provide textual space for writers to enact different identities. At a time when the global figuring power of performativity (Ball, 2003) actively restricts the ways in which teachers and children interact, this paper also presents an informed argument for the value of school-university research partnerships.

Research reports teachers around the world currently face major challenges to their professional agency. They face numerous pressures from accountability measures operating in the highly politicised field of literacy education and standardised testing. At the same time international research encourages teachers to design rich assessment tasks engaging students with literary texts. This paper addresses the paradox of policy working against professionalism. It is illustrated with vignettes of data to demonstrate how collective agency driven through teacher inquiry enabled a group of teachers to negotiate their professional accountability with epistemological benefits for their students. Situated in discourse supporting agentive pedagogies, the paper gives an account of a collaborative project in Australia where three primary teachers teaching students aged 10-12 years worked with an academic research partner to investigate their own teaching practice. The paper takes a sociocultural orientation to literacy research. It examines students' responses to dialogic prompts in Literature Circles framed within a discussion that acknowledges contextual influences on teacher authority. It provides evidence of successful practice that encourages other educators to resist the power dynamics underpinning reductionist assessments of literacy achievement. The negotiation of professional agency is showcased through the teaching of literature in the classroom.

This paper synthesises aspects of functional grammar and cognitive stylistics to posit a theoretical approach to the teaching of the grammar of narrative writing to upper primary and lower secondary students. It is argued the development of students' metalinguistic understanding is essential if they are to make informed language choices as they write. Cognitive stylistics is an embodied theory of grammar derived from literary studies, which is used here to construct a theoretical framework for teaching metalinguistic understanding in writing. The proposed framework includes concepts to support the way writers might focus their 'readerly' attention via devices such as 'figure' and 'ground', 'scope', 'attentional windowing' and 'deixis', to create narrative perspectives and interactions between narrative participants, by means of 'clausal action chains'. The theory is premised on the idea that students can be taught to 'embody' the imagined narrative world, and make specific grammatical choices to effectively capture, for the reader, each element of their story. The framework outlines the role of the teacher, when supporting the student, in both the 'embodiment' of their narrative, and their grammatical decision-making.

The extent to which children's reading experiences influence their writing production is not well understood. It is imperative that the connections between these literacy practices are elucidated in order to inform the development of stimulating curricula and to support children's development. This paper presents new data and key findings from a project investigating relationships between children's free choice reading and volitional writing in Key Stage 2 (9-10 years). The data were collected in two primary schools in northern England, using mixed methods. Quantitative data were collected using an online reading survey taken by 170 children, and qualitative data were provided through independent writing journals maintained by 38 participants. Through analysis of the data using a multiliteracies approach, we demonstrate that the writing that children choose to do is influenced by the texts they encounter as readers in terms of content, text type and linguistic style. The child readers in this project encountered texts in different media and created texts in a range of genres. By examining a sample of children's written texts from the data set, we show that children's interactions and transactions with texts as readers and writers are complex and multiple. Children creatively work across media, and in doing so the boundaries of traditional text genres and styles are redeveloped and redesigned. These findings highlight the importance of providing children with opportunities to freely choose and create texts and recognising the wide variety of text experiences that children bring to their classroom learning.

This paper reports on the digital writing practices of a Grade Three primary school student as he used an iPad to plan, produce and share digital texts. The case study acknowledges that writing is undergoing a period of great change in many classrooms and works to show how a student author has interpreted and produced digital texts with new technologies. In particular, the specific practices, digital materials and literacy concepts will be explicated through analyses of two digital texts created by this author. This focus acknowledges the ways texts can be planned, produced and shared using multiple modes and media. These social practices and the wider learning opportunities afforded through the flexible and recursive ways students produce text have yet to be fully explored. This paper also extends current understandings about digital writing practices through its examination of the connections between and among multiple apps as an author crafts digital text.

Autistic learners master visual and spatial abilities; they use visual language to organise, understand and give meaning to the world. Although they might struggle with verbal skills, they have an associative way of thinking. Taking into consideration the characteristics of seven autistic pupils, the aim of this paper was to identify the potential of picture books in relation to autistic readers in order to explain why picture books can be supportive tools for improving verbal and social communication skills. The findings, based on a qualitative case study and a reader response framework, show that picture books help children with autism develop social and communication skills as well as foster imagination. Their written outcomes clearly showed children's need to tell stories.

This paper presents a small-scale study examining the effects of metacognitive reading strategy instruction on English language learners' reading comprehension in a Hong Kong international school. Twenty-five primary school (Grade 5) students who learn English as a second language participated in this study. Metacognitive instruction was incorporated into 10 process-based reading lessons. Data were collected from notes learners took during reading, post-reading reflection reports, teacher-facilitated group discussions and two types of reading tests. Results revealed that the young learners could articulate several knowledge factors that influenced their reading. In addition, learners reported a better understanding of the nature and demands of reading, a deeper awareness of metacognitive knowledge in improving reading comprehension and increased confidence in handling reading exercises. The learners also showed enhanced reading performance compared to those in a control group without metacognitive intervention. This study highlights the potential of metacognitive instruction to enhance primary school English learners' reading literacy.

This paper reports a study that examines the integration of tablet technologies such as iPads into literacy lessons to investigate how reading and meaning-making occur within this digital medium. Specifically in this paper, we discuss the concept of reading paths as applied to physical and cognitive planes of meaning-making. The paper reports on data collected as part of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funded project involving researchers from Canada, the United States and Australia. The study is currently under way in schools in the three different countries where the researchers are observing students in classrooms in primary and secondary schools. The research is designed with a mixed methods approach coding video footage of dyads to enable close study of their interaction during literacy tasks incorporating iPads. Our findings show that the affordances of touch technology allow for multimodal, multidirectional reading paths. By tracking students' interactions with the digital platform through touch, it is possible to see navigation as evidence of the relationship between material and cognitive processes, which fosters metatextual awareness. These aspects of modes and new literacies construct a dynamic materiality for students' reading and writing. As a result, we propose that current awareness of the mode of gesture needs to be expanded to take into account haptic ways of learning.

This paper explores how job-embedded professional development supported a Year 1 teacher as he enacted his growing expertise in the teaching of guided reading. By analysing coaching conversations focussed on the teacher's guided reading practices, we studied the way his teaching developed over a 7-month period. Our findings suggest the teacher gained deeper understandings in the domain of reading, which allowed him to be more responsive to children during guided reading. We discuss the factors that enhanced or inhibited his ability to implement what he learned and offer suggestions for supporting teachers through job-embedded professional development.

Set against the backdrop of children being 'alienated' from their writing, this paper is taken from a United Kingdom Literacy Association sponsored project where primary school teachers were trained to use process drama in order to give children more agency in their writing across the curriculum. Here, we use discourse analysis to think about the children's historical creative writing in relation to the drama lessons which are differently framed by the teachers. Building upon a theoretical model of process drama as involving 'embodied experience' and writing as problem-solving, a case is made that process drama can lead to what we term 'agentic writing'. Agentic writing, we demonstrate, involves children actively translating their embodied experience of process drama into writing by making a range of intertextual borrowings. These borrowings serve both to capture and transform their embodied experience as the children gain agency by standing outside language to achieve 'double voicedness' and in doing so write sophisticated texts. Seeing the relationship between process drama and writing in this light, we argue, provides a means of reconnecting children to the act of writing.

Drawing on the bilingual policies and biliteracy programmes of African nations, this paper discusses the context of literacy education in Nigeria and examines Nigerian early literacy teachers' attitudes to teaching literacy and literacy teaching practices as informed by the National Policy on Education, Primary English Language Curriculum and the teaching-learning milieu. The paper also reports the findings of a survey in which respondents to a questionnaire expressed their views and understanding of the primary English curriculum and their own relations and experiences with it, as well as their own competencies and self-concept as literacy teachers. Results indicated the need to train Nigerian teachers to adopt a much wider perspective in literacy, which recognises the opportunities for developing the interrelated strands of literacy. Governments should also consider practising teachers' professional identities and growth in decision-making and curriculum development. This will enhance their understanding of ideologies in policy and practice.

This paper presents findings from a national project in England, The Power of Reading (Centre for Literacy in Primary Education), which has involved to date 41 projects over 5 years, in 16 Local Authorities nationally, with 900 schools and 1,350 teachers. The paper presents findings for the first 4 years. Our data demonstrate how professional development has increased teachers' knowledge of children's literature and developed their confidence in using a wide range of creative pedagogies based on texts. The paper draws on evidence to describe how the emotional power of texts can affect both teachers and children and change their engagement as readers. A range of evidence demonstrates children's responses to texts and their developing understanding through writing, talk, drawing and art work. We provide evidence to show how these factors have increased children's motivation and attainment as readers.

This paper explores primary school children's ability to engage with "the power of the text" by tackling persuasive writing in the form of an advertisement. It is eclectically framed within genre theory and rhetorical studies and makes use of linguistic tools and concepts. The paper argues that writing research has not built upon earlier publications in these areas. There is a need for studies of advertisement writing to consolidate and extend the recent interest in non-fiction text types. The writing of two children, drawn from a much larger study, is used to provide evidence of some key features of advertisement writing. Use of a pro forma reveals how children imbue the power of their writing through a variety of techniques and suggests how these features may develop over time. It is argued that an understanding of advertisement writing warrants careful exploration, as persuasive writing is generally being given a more prominent place in curriculum provision in England. The paper concludes by noting the importance of ecological validity and pupil engagement when persuasive writing is tackled in schools. It also suggests the need for new kinds of customised analyses when further studies of this kind of writing are undertaken.

In contributing to debates about how student-teachers might draw from personal experience in addressing digital literacy in the classroom, this paper explores the stories that one primary student-teacher told of her digital practices during a larger study of the role of digital literacy in student-teachers' lives. The paper investigates the "recognition work" this student-teacher did as she aligned herself with different discourses and notes how themes of "control" and "professionalism" seemed to pattern her stories of informal and formal practices both within and beyond her professional education. The paper calls for further research into how student-teachers perceive the relevance of their personal experience to their professional role and argues for encouraging pre-service and practising teachers to tell stories of their digital practices and reflect upon the discourses which frame them.

This paper reports the first part of a 2-year longitudinal study, which examined the impact of age of entry to school on the reading development of 60 summer-born boys during Key Stage One. The sample was drawn from 18 schools in six Local Education Authorities operating different admissions policies. Thirty-one had attended nursery part-time, while 29 had experienced full-time reception class before their fifth birthday and before statutory age of entry to school. The data offer an original portrayal of learning to read through the voices of a group of 5-year-old boys as they reflected on home and school literacy events relating to reading. Reading acquisition was examined within a theoretical model which incorporates attitudinal factors as intrinsic and defining components of reading literacy. The data draw attention to the centrality of these factors in the complex structure which supports the process of reading acquisition, acknowledging the need to investigate this process from the perspective of the child. This paper discusses the findings in the context of the boys' early years experience and the implications in the light of the widespread debate about age of entry to school and appropriate early years practice. The data suggest the current wide-spread skills-based approach to reading often ignores the crucial motivational elements that make a real reader and that the formality associated with this approach may be damaging reading attitudes in the youngest children of our reception classes.

This article argues that it is possible to look at children's texts in relation to the lens of literacy events and practices from the New Literacy Studies, and apply this perspective to an understanding of creativity. Teachers can then use the possibilities within a text to ask children different kinds of questions. Drawing on a 2-year ethnographic study of a partnership between a group of artists and teachers in an Infants School in England, and their impact on children's text-making, the paper seeks to understand the ways in which such a text can be identified as creative. A detailed analysis of one child's text is offered as evidence of this argument. This account is set within a project to map children's play in a Foundation classroom.

This paper describes the impact of an oral retelling of Homer's "Iliad" on pupils' learning in Key Stage 2 classrooms (children aged 9-11) in schools in East London. We argue that the oral nature of the retelling and responses promoted high levels of engagement and inclusion, leading to enhanced understanding by the pupils. The use of a complex and emotionally powerful text also encouraged a changing of the nature of the discourse between teachers and pupils. Finally we argue for the use of texts like the "Iliad" as an integral part of the literacy curriculum.

This paper aims to present a critical analysis of the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check (PSC), with special focus on the relationship between the UK Department for Education's policy-making and the evidence considered in the process of developing and evaluating the PSC. The reports from the in-house Standards and Testing Agency and from commissioned external organisations with limited remits have been analysed, with emphasis on how the screening check findings have been used in DfE decision-making. My conclusion is that the department has overestimated both the validity and the reliability of the check: partly because important sources of measurement error have not been explored, and partly because the available evidence has not been analysed in sufficient depth--or perhaps simply been ignored by the department. The whole phonics screening check seems to be the product of policy-based evidence, rather than evidence-based policy-making. This has, in my view, seriously undermined the value of the PSC as a screening instrument, and one must wonder whether it is "fit for purpose."

In this paper, I consider the relationship between socio-economic background and the school experience of two groups of children. I seek to establish whether or not there are identifiable differences in the language of primary school children living in two demographically contrasting geographical areas and, if there are differences, how these differences might impact upon a child's capacity to access learning. In investigating these relationships, I conducted semi-structured interviews with the two groups using the work of Bernstein as a starting point. I found that while the children in the first school, located in a largely less affluent area of Bristol, appeared to lack confidence, extended vocabulary and often clarity in their speech, the children in the second school, located in a middle class, affluent area of the city appeared articulate, self-confident and in possession of a varied and extended vocabulary. While it is not appropriate to generalise from this small scale study, these findings raise questions about the language children experience from an early age both in the home environment and at school and suggest that there is a significant part for schools to play in ensuring that they are not excluding some groups of children from participation.

Guided reading is widely perceived to be tricky in English primary schools; prior research has found difficulties with teacher interpretation and implementation. The study reported here suggests that to understand the problems associated with it we should also take into account pupils' perspectives on their guided reading lessons. In this case, the pupils were 4-7?years old. The special challenges of accessing young pupil perspectives were addressed through co-authored drawings, a type of graphic elicitation. The drawings, together with other collected data, generated insights into pupil perceptions of literacy practices, of the role of friends and ability grouping in learning to read, and of their teachers' organisational challenges. A socio-cultural analysis of these data indicates that these pupils were sensitive to the social and cultural contexts of their guided reading lessons. It may be that precise official advice for guided reading in England, originating in the National Literacy Strategy documents in 1999 and the Primary National Strategy documents in 2003 and 2008, has been insufficiently sensitive to the complex teaching and learning contexts of guided reading and that this discrepancy has contributed to the identified difficulties. The paper concludes that some rethinking of the literacy practice of guided reading would be valuable.

Research on implementing reading strategy instruction has primarily focused on teachers' verbal communication with limited attention to other semiotic resources such as gesture and artefacts. In this paper, we construct a "telling case" on the basis of how one primary teacher from the United States used speech, gesture and artefacts as a means of communication while instructing her students in reasons to predict when reading. Data sources for this case study consisted of field notes, artefacts and digital video. We analysed the teacher's use of gesture, speech and artefacts from a social semiotic multimodal perspective. Findings indicate that the teacher created meaning by interweaving multiple modes in the communicative contexts of strategy instruction using speech, deictic gestures, metaphoric gestures and artefacts. These findings are important to reading strategy instruction because much of the research and discussion of practice to date has centred on the instruction of reading strategies using teacher and student speech and not attending to the use of semiotic resources beyond speech.

This paper examines the use of student planners (agendas) with elementary school students. It asks how teachers, students and parents in two classrooms engage in the literacy practice of using student planners. A literacy object originally introduced to manage schoolwork in and out of school for students with learning difficulties, planners are now used widely in school districts across North America. In this cross-case analysis, planners are shown to be used for a number of functions beyond organising students' schoolwork. The student planners were tools through which teachers, parents and publishers extended their spheres of influence -- objects used to manage others when an individual was not physically present to do so and objects used to gain entry to the classrooms and homes for particular purposes. (Contains 4 figures.)

Evidence suggests (Ofsted, 2007) that the role of the Subject Leader is crucial in how well poetry is taught in schools. This paper attempts to provide some insights on "what it is like" to coordinate poetry teaching in a primary school. Some of the data confirm elements of the findings from earlier research on the state of poetry in schools, particularly concerning space in the curriculum, teacher subject knowledge and personal interest in poetry. However, we attempt to show that, much to the surprise of some of the Subject Leaders, where poetry teaching in the participants' schools was perceived to be successful it was often nourished by the combined enthusiasm and "zeal" of the teachers and children experiencing poetry together, which in turn was maintained by an empowering synergy of professional/personal pleasure and engagement with poetic texts experienced by some of the teachers while in school.

This paper draws upon data from a research project, undertaken in 2 Year 6 classrooms during the 2006 World Cup, to analyse how children used complex sentence structures in their writing on a football web-log. We explore how the confluence of a temporary, popular, global event and an online forum for communication created a moment of linguistic empowerment where pupils began to use high-level forms of language, and we consider the implications of transience and interactivity for the teaching and learning of sentence grammar.

This paper reports the findings of a study of the literacy perceptions and practices of general primary teachers (Key Stage 2) and post-primary science teachers (Key Stage 3) within two clusters of schools. The study also explores the possible impact on pupils of any difference in the language climate which may accompany them on their journey across this curricular interface. Interviews with science managers and teachers suggest a quite restricted view of literacy is taken in both phases of schooling with no evidence of any practices which may support the notion of curricular continuity. The different approaches to the introduction of scientific terminology, writing, reading and classroom discussion were reflected in pupils' accounts of their experience and clearly posed a problem for some. We suggest there would be merit in teachers adopting a much wider perspective on literacy which recognises the opportunities for developing the interrelated strands of "general literacy" and "the discourses of science" alongside "learning through language". By addressing each of these domains, and sharing practice across the key stages, a more comprehensive and coherent approach to "language, literacy and science learning" may result, in turn helping minimise the adverse effects of "language climate change".

Social networking can currently be described as a mainstream youth activity, with almost half of 8-17-year-old children, who have access to the Internet, claiming to participate. As an activity it is of particular interest to literacy educators because it is enacted through the production and consumption of text. However, a growing body of research is finding that while young people transfer knowledge and practices across the sites that they occupy, children's text production using informal digital literacy practices and children's school-based text production can be regarded as increasingly disparate activities. This paper draws from a current research project that is exploring three pre-teenage children's text production in social networking sites. Here one child's "Bebo" profile page is presented and discussed in order that the forces that play upon her text production can be identified. Through consideration of these forces, a framework for considering children's text production in informal digital environments is suggested. This framework steps away from the existing frameworks currently found within the Primary National Strategy for Literacy and Mathematics and instead requires that children's texts are viewed in relation to structure and agency.

This paper describes the development and use of the Creative Learning Assessment (CLA) as a means of evidencing, supporting and promoting children's creative learning in arts-based contexts. The research team at the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) worked with a group of teachers in inner-city Lambeth primary schools to develop an assessment system to record the impact of a creative curriculum on children's achievement and to enable schools to justify a broad-based provision. The Assessing Learning and Communication in Creative Learning Contexts project, funded by CfBT Education Trust (CfBT), aimed to offer teachers a view of creative learning development and a framework for teacher assessment. It set out to provide a close focus on the learner and a valuable source of information for curriculum planning. This article discusses the effect of working with the CLA on children's learning and on teachers' practice through a case study of one project school, and the implications for schools and classrooms from the perspectives of the researcher and the teacher.

Given the narrow scope of primary teachers' knowledge and use of children's literature identified in Phase I of "Teachers as Readers" (2006-2007), the core goal of the Phase II project was to improve teachers' knowledge and experience of such literature in order to help them increase children's motivation and enthusiasm for reading, especially those less successful in literacy. The year-long Phase II project, "Teachers as Readers: Building Communities of Readers", which was undertaken in five Local Authorities (LAs) in England, also sought to build new relationships with parents and families and to explore the concept of a "Reading Teacher (RT): a teacher who reads and a reader who teaches" (Commeyras and colleagues). The research design was multilayered; involving data collection at individual, school and LA levels, and using a range of quantitative and qualitative data research methods and tools. This paper provides an overview of the Phase II research. It suggests that teachers need support if they are to develop children's reading for pleasure, and enhance their involvement as socially engaged and self-motivated readers.

The notion of "multiliteracies" and the development and creation of multimodal texts within classrooms is of pedagogic interest in this age of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). The case study reported herein provides an analysis of how one teacher engaged her class of primary school students as they responded to the challenge of creating and filming a 30-second television commercial on a social justice issue. The media texts were constructed in a 10-week period. The paper describes the process as the teacher and these students planned, wrote, filmed and edited their commercials. It offers an example of how the changing nature of literacy and, specifically, text, is enacted in the classroom.

This paper reports on two studies which investigated the relationship between children's texting behaviour, their knowledge of text abbreviations and their school attainment in written language skills. In Study One, 11-12-year-old children provided information on their texting behaviour. They were also asked to translate a standard English sentence into a text message and vice versa. The children's standardised verbal and non-verbal reasoning scores were also obtained. Children who used their mobiles to send three or more text messages a day had significantly lower scores than children who sent none. However, the children who, when asked to write a text message, showed greater use of text abbreviations ("textisms") tended to have better performance on a measure of verbal reasoning ability, which is highly associated with Key Stage 2 (KS2) and 3 English scores. In Study Two, children's performance on writing measures was examined more specifically. Ten to eleven-year-old children were asked to complete another English to text message translation exercise. Spelling proficiency was also assessed, and KS2 Writing scores were obtained. Positive correlations between spelling ability and performance on the translation exercise were found, and group-based comparisons based on the children's writing scores also showed that good writing attainment was associated with greater use of textisms, although the direction of this association is nor clear. Overall, these findings suggest that children's knowledge of textisms is not associated with poor written language outcomes for children in this age range.

This paper explores one way that teachers can develop creativity within potentially limiting confines and pressures of curriculum guidelines. The researcher considers the inclusion of film as a creative, engaging and effective strategy for teaching reading using data from a small-scale research project. Hypotheses are based on analysis of activities that use moving image as an alternative text to printed books. During the project's teaching sequence, children are familiarised with film as a moving image, ideas are captured, the teacher demonstrates the use of techniques in meaning making, before the children finally show their understanding through their work. In this instance, the children were involved in making their own films, acting as directors, film crew, sound technicians, illustrators and narrators. As the partial purpose of the study was to explore the practical logistics of developing a creative teaching style within a structured curriculum, tight timings were an essential aspect of the validity of the work. All the teaching was completed within the normal hourly lesson for literacy, and the basic structure of lessons was maintained--an introduction with whole-class work, followed by individual/paired or group work and concluded with a plenary. The researcher values the creative use of film as a powerful experience in itself and the study aimed to substantiate these beliefs by exploring both the accessibility and the results of harnessing the power of film within literacy teaching.

This article presents work undertaken with a class of Scottish Primary Six children (aged 10) to investigate the use of interactive whiteboard technology and interactive talking books in whole-class writing lessons. The paper reports on a research project with three aims: to investigate how the use of an interactive whiteboard to reflect on the language and style of professional authors influenced the children's own writing; to examine the effect of this experience on the writing and behaviour of children with additional support needs; and to identify the advantages and disadvantages of using such technology in whole-class writing lessons. The resulting evidence suggests that while some children benefited from the approach, teaching children to write through examination of professional models of writing in whole-class lessons did not promote the most effective learning even where the text was provided in such an interactive medium. The implications of these results for practitioners who wish to use talking books and whiteboard technology to teach writing are discussed.

This paper examines the history, rationale, uses and abuses of writing journals in primary classrooms. We argue that writing journals form part of a pedagogy derived from an understanding of how children can be motivated to express themselves, independently of teachers. Moreover, they demonstrate the power of welcoming children's home cultures into the classroom. However, we also wish to argue that the use of writing journals is part of the teaching profession's "creative compliance" that can still contribute to the marginalisation of effective educational practice. We document how, in some schools in England, writing journals have been reduced to token gestures towards creativity and independence and in effect collude with and support what is increasingly becoming a pedagogical hegemony.

This paper argues that teachers' recognition of children's cultural practices is an important positive step in helping socio-economically disadvantaged children engage with school literacies. Based on 21 longitudinal case studies of children's literacy development over a 3-year period, the authors demonstrate that when children's knowledges and practices assembled in home and community spheres are treated as valuable material for school learning, children are more likely to invest in the work of acquiring school literacies. However, they also show that while some children benefit greatly from being allowed to draw on their knowledge of popular culture, sports and the outdoors, other children's interests may be ignored or excluded. Some differences in teachers' valuing of home and community cultures appeared to relate to gender dimensions.

This article is written in response to the article published in issue 39.3 of this journal, in November 2005, on the nature of the Key Stage 2 National Curriculum reading tests: "Examining England's National Curriculum assessments: an analysis of the KS2 reading test questions" by Anne Kispal of the National Foundation for Educational Research. It argues that, far from providing a valid and rewarding assessment experience for pupils as Kispal suggests, the primary English tests at the end of KS2 are invalid as a measuring instrument and are having a damaging effect on pedagogy. The tests and the information on them provided by the Qualifications and Curriculum Agency are based on a misleading unidimensional conception of reading literacy attainment. Because the test assessment simply adds together marks achieved for very different cognitive skills, it propagates a dysfunctional model of literacy pedagogy that conflates and confuses two separate developmental trajectories--word reading and text comprehension. The article goes on to argue that the unidimensionality of the national tests and their pedagogic apparatus has constricted the primary English curriculum in ways that are damaging for young pupils and for the national need for creativity and enterprise.

This paper documents an initiative in Continuing Professional Development, conceived and carried out by London's "Centre for Literacy in Primary Education" (CLPE). The intention was to improve the teaching and learning of writing in Years 5 and 6 of the primary school (9-11-year-olds), through working with challenging literature. This teacher education project drew on CLPE's earlier research project, published as "The Reader in the Writer" (Barrs and Cork, 2001). Classroom approaches developed through the initiative are described, and qualitative and quantitative changes in children's writing are discussed. Patterns of teaching in the classrooms that appear to have made a particular difference to the children's achievement are explored.

The Year 6 National Curriculum reading test has become a familiar and established annual experience at the end of the primary phase in schools throughout England. From 1993 onwards, each year the national reading test for 11-year-olds has consisted of a different set of texts, accompanied by a different set of questions. With over a decade's accumulation of national assessment materials, the National Foundation for Educational Research decided to fund a project to take stock of the reading test, scrutinise what children have been expected to do over the years, and track the evolution of the assessment. A new taxonomy of question focuses, introduced by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in 2003, provided the opportune moment to conduct a retrospective re-categorisation of all the questions that had ever appeared in a Key Stage 2 reading test. This paper reports on that exercise and reveals that some forms of questioning remain constant and reappear every year, while others are subject to variation.

This paper concerns an approach to raising literacy standards which is rather different from the prevailing orthodoxy the Rhyme and Ritual project. The project is run by the Hamilton Reading Project, which comprises a series of initiatives funded by the Hamilton Trust, an educational charity, and implemented in fifteen primary schools in a large and socio-economically deprived city area in southern England. It incorporates both a supposedly old-fashioned traditional notion that children can be supported in learning to read through approaching a text known off by heart (the phrase is important, since the text must not only be familiar but also pleasurable to the individual child) and also the currently valued approach of expanding and extending children's appropriation and use of elaborated language, particularly in relation to imaginative, descriptive and expressive writing. It is the former aspect of the Rhyme and Ritual project, namely the provision of short texts to be memorised by young children and then read from text only books (with decoration but no illustrations) that we believe is uncommon as the basis of an educational initiative with the overt aim of raising literacy standards. The article gives a detailed outline of this initiative, with its two-pronged and pincer approach, and also some indication of how it is succeeding.

The promise to raise literacy standards significantly at age 11 in economically disadvantaged areas has been an important part of the present British Government's educational policy. Integral to this promise has been the introduction of official homeschool contracts or agreements, which oblige parents to engage in specific literacy activities with their children. However, evidence from a longitudinal study of family literacy practices in East London suggests that family and community members other than parents might play a crucial role in initiating young children into literacy. Siblings particularly have been found to be efficient teachers of school literacy practices. In this paper, I investigate particularly ways in which an unspoken collusion takes place between teacher and older sibling revealed during play school sessions in Bangladeshi British households in East London.

Abstract: New research findings are presented in this paper, responding to a significant knowledge gap about the role of pedagogy in tackling persistent educational inequalities. The paper examines the potential of reading for pleasure (RfP) pedagogy to disrupt ‘pedagogy of poverty’ in low socio‐economic (SES) schools and to enable children to reap the cognitive, well‐being and social benefits of RfP. Children's volition and social interaction as readers are central to RfP and have been found to be particularly constrained by pedagogy common in low SES schools in the United States, Australia and England. The research examined how pedagogy for RfP was instantiated in four low SES English primary schools to understand how this potential might be realised and its effects on children's engagement with RfP. The schools were selected because they had invested in RfP, yet the study found their RfP pedagogies did not in practice support children's volition and engagement because teachers' understandings of reading focused upon proficiency. Such teachers need to reconceptualise reading as social and volitional to underpin RfP pedagogies. The paper provides new insight into the challenges of developing genuine RfP pedagogy and other pedagogies that profile volition and active engagement with learning in low SES schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the author's discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the development of reading habits to children, the reading comprehension, and testing for reading ability.

This paper reports on some data on the effects of screen-based interactivity on children's engagement with storybook apps during family shared book reading that were gathered in a 2-year, small-scale ethnographic case study in Spain. Data analysis focuses on the complex interplay between the storybook app's interactive features and the children's responses to them. Our findings show that interactive elements increase the child's autonomy, as they tend to promote the importance of the reader, positioning him or her as a collaborator, storyteller, an author or an internal character in the fiction; something that can materialise in exciting narrative strategies that can trigger powerful responses to digital literary texts in emergent readers, including playing, creating new fictions or engaging emotionally with the story. Finally, we argue that the Reader Response models that have been used over recent decades to understand children's reading experiences with storybooks need to be revised to better understand their current experiences with interactive texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses aspects of ‘third space’ theory to support the use of site-based classroom role play as a means of ensuring continuity of text construction between home and school. A hypothetical continuum of text construction between home and school is described, and it is suggested that schools wishing to support this continuum might consider incorporating some home-type contexts and pedagogies into classroom practice. A model of site-based role play is described that aims to do this by setting up an actual third space in primary classrooms, together with some of the educational outcomes of the model's implementation. Implications for schools and family learning programmes are briefly discussed. In conclusion, the paper argues that if we want curriculum continuity between home and school, we need to create ‘third spaces’ in schools that bring together the experiences and pedagogies of both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper, we demonstrate the relationship between reading and writing for pleasure. Children read a wide range of media as well as books for pleasure and develop strong affective bonds with the artefacts of literacy they encounter. What remains less well understood is the relationship between the array of texts children engage with and the texts they subsequently create. A focus on “Reading for Pleasure” has enabled us to think anew about the relationships between the texts children read, play and engage with and those they make, play and tell. Data from two doctoral research projects illuminate the ways children draw on cultural resources, moving skilfully across mode, medium and form. In doing so, they learn language conventions which enable them to engage in schooled literacies and learn to use conventional language techniques for their own purposes to transform and re‐imagine texts. Children's identities as readers, writers and storytellers are constructed holistically, and we explore the role of pleasure in reading and meaning making. In conclusion, we consider the potential for positioning reading for pleasure not in isolation, but as a strand in the complex fabric of literacy that needs to be nurtured in children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Increasing numbers of children are caught up in global flows of moving peoples. This movement may be voluntary or forced and is experienced within a range of settings. Coming from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, and moving around the world due to their parents' employment, the children found in traditional International Schools are a case in point. This paper focuses on the experiences of two sisters in the first year of their family's global relocation. In the midst of change, the digital world Club Penguin™ offered these two globally mobile children a familiar and welcome site of continuity and belonging. This exploration of the role of digital worlds and digital literacies in these girls' experience contributes to an understanding of connections between global movement and digital literacy practices. Greater awareness of the significance of digital literacies in globally mobile children's lives provides fresh insights into how children participate in digital spaces and has implications for literacy educators supporting young people in contemporary times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]