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Purpose: This study aims to explore how teachers in a large, diverse district could use a complex adolescent literacy curriculum, and it coincided with the start of the coronavirus 2019 pandemic, also a time of great upheaval for this nation. The authors and district partners collaboratively designed document sets that could help students explore socially complex historical topics with discipline-specific reading and writing support. These challenges led to fully virtual PD and redesigned cognitive tools and lesson materials that could be used in a fully distanced learning environment. Design/methodology/approach: PD and data collection were ongoing and iterative, as the authors' goals were to understand variability in teachers' understanding and how the social unrest in the nation and the need for distance learning would influence their application of our curriculum. Data sources included teacher artifacts, interviews and implementation surveys and anonymized student work samples. The third author wrote memos during webinars and district meetings. The authors employed a grounded theory approach to analyze teachers' evolving understandings of how to teach students to make judgments, their lesson differentiation and their attention to social justice issues. Findings: Teachers who attended the authors' online PD increased their knowledge of the authors' cognitive apprenticeship (CA) approach to instruction, demonstrating more sophisticated understandings of important historical thinking skills and the need to provide students with explicit instruction and appropriate cognitive scaffolds. By the end of the year, teachers also showed ease in using new technological platforms and a more flexible use of disciplinary thinking scaffolds in ways the authors hoped. Finally, teachers in the authors' sample (and their students) frequently made connections between topics and sources in the authors' curriculum and ongoing societal problems (such as systemic racism) in this nation. Research limitations/implications: The authors' original sample of teachers was over 70; however, this number eventually fell to nine teachers (about 12.5% of the eligible participants) due to many ongoing challenges (e.g. teaching while parenting) during this time period. The authors note that teachers who remained engaged with the authors had over 10 years of experience and all but one had at some point been in a leadership position such as a team lead or department head. It is possible that experience teachers found on the authors' curriculum intervention to be too challenging to implement during the pandemic. Practical implications: Online PD can be successful when sessions focus on content that teachers will use with students. We provided video models showing teachers how to teach historical reading and writing using the authors' tools and supports authors' platform. Although brief, the authors gave teachers opportunities for collaborative practice during webinars, and time to share challenges related to virtual teaching. In return, teachers shared what was working for them and allowed the authors to use anonymized student materials as the basis for subsequent materials for teaching students to make historical judgments. Social implications: All students, including those with learning or attentional disabilities/difficulties, emergent bilingual students, underrepresented students or marginalized students, must learn to grapple with complex historical and political information. Doing so will support their ability to make sense of conflicting and/or politicized information that pervades the media today and to judge for themselves what counts as evidence and truth. Originality/value: Although there are a small number of teachers, this study shows that a strong research partnership between a university and district office can support the successful implementation of a complex historical literacy curriculum that allows students to explore social justice issues while learning important disciplinary literacy skills. Future work will share student learning outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complex learning happens through supporting inquiry and innovation, not through standardized control that constrains. However, national and international assessment of students are used in (re)structuring the educational priorities and policies that guide national educational systems. This paper is based of f of a qualitative dissertation study that explored how mandated high-stakes testing inf luences educators within a complex educational system in Texas. At each level within the system--the classroom, campus, and district levels--participants described the ways they perceive these inf luences and constraints on their decisions related to eighth-grade reading curriculum and instruction within their system. Using thematic analysis and complex adaptive system frameworks, the patterns at each level were mapped to identify tensions within and between these nested complex systems. Findings indicate a strong push towards standardization, and adaptive action is discussed as a way to identify and respond to this standardization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, one hundred secondary students were randomly assigned to a treatment or comparison group. The treatment group received a Reader's Theater version of a story to read aloud as a group. The comparison group received the same story in its regular format to read silently. Both groups' reading comprehension were assessed using a 10-question quiz related to the text. According to the results of the one-way ANOVA, students in the Reader's Theater treatment group signif icantly outperformed the silent reading comparison on the reading comprehension assessment, indicating that providing students with scripted stories and the chance to perform them can improve reading comprehension. Practical implications and limitations are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of supplemental word recognition strategies on students receiving intensive (Tier III) remedial reading instruction. Two-hundred and thirteen middle school students with reading difficulties received an intensive reading intervention (i.e., Corrective Reading Decoding strand) delivered by trained school staff (n = 21) at three middle schools. The 213 fifth through eighth grade students (121 males, 92 females) enrolled in three northwestern school districts (two rural and one urban). Of the 213 students, one-hundred and seven also received supplemental word recognition instruction using Reading Excellence: Word Attack and Rate Development Strategies (REWARDS). Using a pre-post quasi-experimental design, the effects of the Corrective Reading Decoding (CRD) program was compared to CRD combined with the REWARDS program. The REWARDS program produced statistically and educationally significant changes in the basic reading skills of students over and above Corrective Reading Decoding alone. Students in the REWARDS condition demonstrated statistically significant mean changes on the WJ-III Basic Reading Skills cluster and associated subtests and the DIBELS ORF probe compared to those in the comparison condition. Results, implications, and limitations are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a quarter of a century the annual What's Hot, What's Not in Literacy Survey has interviewed literacy leaders to identify the literacy topics at the center of current attention. In this article the 25 years of longitudinal survey data are analyzed to identify the topics that were: (a) deemed the "hottest" and "coldest", (b) received the most attention while being featured on the survey, and (c) ranked "should be hot" most frequently across the survey's history. Findings indicate that the "hottest" topics were assessment and accountability, English language learners, and adolescent literacy, while the "coldest" topic was motivation and reader engagement. Topics receiving the highest amounts of attention while being featured on the survey were the science of teaching reading and dyslexia. Most rated topics for "should be hot" were English language learners, adolescent literacy, comprehension, and struggling readers. Historical context for each of these topics is offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical thinking is one of the most highly sought skills in education, yet questions remain about instilling students with this elusive set of skills and dispositions. Is it generalizable or discipline-specific? How should it be taught? This article describes an approach by two middle school teachers who developed and taught an in-person and virtual humanities curriculum. They utilized an instructional routine involving discussion and writing to help students comprehend and think critically about challenging, disciplinary texts. Opportunities for discussion and writing before, during, and after reading allowed for scaffolded, deeper understandings of the texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the unique literacy needs of adolescent learners and challenges the traditional practice of literacy remediation, often tied to standardized test scores, in U.S. public schools. A call for more responsive literacy instruction that employs a disciplinary, holistic approach rather than a skillsbased, deficit-informed approach is articulated, as well as recommendations for practice in literacy instruction informed by research on literacy identity development. As we begin to imagine our schools in a post-COVID world, we must rethink our instruction and move toward a model of literacy that is more relevant, more responsive, and, above all, more human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate adolescent English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' digitally mediated multimodal compositions across different genres of writing. Design/methodology/approach: Three Korean high school students participated in the study and created multiple multimodal texts over the course of one academic semester. These texts and other materials were the basis for this study's qualitative case studies. Multiple sources of data (e.g. class observations, demographic surveys, interviews, field notes and students' artifacts) were collected. Drawing upon the inductive approach, a coding-oriented analysis was used for the collected data. In addition, a multimodal text analysis was conducted for the students' multimodal texts and their storyboards. Findings: The study participants' perceptions of multimodal composing practices seemed to be positively reshaped as a result of them creating multimodal texts. Some participants created multimodal products in phases (e.g. selecting or changing a topic, constructing a storyboard and editing). Especially, although the students' creative processes had a similarly fixed and linear flow from print-based writing to other modalities, their creative processes proved to be flexible, recursive and/or circular. Originality/value: This study contributes to the understanding of adolescent English language learners' multimodal composing practices in the EFL context, which has been underexplored in the literature. It also presents the students' perspectives on these practices. In short, it provides theoretical and methodological grounds for future L2 literacy researchers to conduct empirical studies on multimodal composing practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using intersectional feminism and narrative inquiry, this paper reflects on a qualitative case study where a trauma text was taught in high school English for the purposes of analyzing students' responses. One gender-fluid participant provided particularly compelling insights and so this project revisits their data. They demonstrate that their lived experience as a gender-fluid youth in school informed their authoring of themselves as a 'diversity worker' and/or 'equity person' (Ahmed, 2017), which overall, resulted in allyship and accomplice work that benefited the school. Because self-defined identities are important (Zamani-Gallaher, 2017) and there is a lack of studies that attend to trans spectrum students' positive experiences in school (Bartholomaeus & Riggs, 2017), this paper aims to address this gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose This paper aims to investigate teacher-initiated whole-group oral reading practices in two ninth-grade reading intervention classrooms and how teachers understood the purposes of those practices.Design/methodology/approach In this qualitative cross-case analysis, a literacy-as-social-practice perspective is used to collaboratively analyze ethnographic data (fieldnotes, audio recordings, interviews, artifacts) across two classrooms.Findings Oral reading was a routine instructional reading event in both classrooms. However, the literacy practices that characterized oral reading and teachers' purposes for using oral reading varied depending on teachers' pedagogical philosophies, instructional goals and contextual constraints. During oral reading, students' opportunities to engage in independent meaning making with texts were either absent or secondary to other purposes or goals.Practical implications Findings emphasize the significance of understanding both how and why oral reading happens in secondary classrooms. Specifically, they point to the importance of collaborating with teachers to (a) examine their own ideas about the power of oral reading and the institutional factors that shape their existing oral reading practices; (b) investigate the intended and actual outcomes of oral reading for their students and (c) develop other instructional approaches to support students to individually and collaboratively make meaning from texts.Originality/value This study falls at the intersection of three under-researched areas of study: the nature of everyday instruction in secondary literacy intervention settings, the persistence of oral reading in secondary school and teachers' purposes for using oral reading in their instruction. Consequently, it contributes new knowledge that can support educators in creating more equitable instructional environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzed three types of visual representations (graphs, maps, & graphic organizers) in the most widely used eighth-grade U.S. History textbooks. The analyses included how each visual was constructed and used within the context of text narrative. Purposeful sampling techniques were used to select a representative sample of varied topics addressed in all textbooks. Findings indicate that graphic organizers and maps were used more frequently across texts than graphs. Although most visuals were constructed well, few texts explicitly or implicitly connected the visuals to texts’ narrative, which has literacy implications for students’ comprehension. Other strengths and areas of need are identified. For areas of need, implications for pedagogies to enhance students’ comprehension of and connections with the visuals themselves are described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An intact 10th grade English as a Foreign Language vocational business junior college reading intervention class (n = 52) received 16 weeks of integrated reading strategy instruction with extensive reading while an intact traditional class (n = 48) received traditional intensive reading instruction with extensive reading. The intervention class showed reading proficiency improvements and increased use of reading strategies, especially strategies activating background knowledge. Furthermore, reading proficiency could be differentiated by learners' use/disuse of context to aid reading comprehension. Outcomes shed light on English reading instruction in Taiwan and offer language teachers an alternative to the traditional approach. Guidelines helpful in designing quality instructional procedures to improve vocational school students' reading proficiency and pedagogical implications for reading strategy instruction in the global language classroom are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose Extant research has painted a clear picture of the myriad ways that schools are failing to provide a meaningful education, and meaningful literacy pedagogies, to all youth. Given this crisis shouldered disproportionately by youth of color in urban schools, this paper aims to take a retrospective approach to understanding the lasting reverberations of a high school poetry class on a group of students who experienced urban traumas including but not limited to educational injustices. In contrast to the representations of failing schools, some current research offers various portraits of urban students engaging in empowering ways in classrooms that make critical use of media arts, poetry and hip hop. The questions driving this study are based on what happens once students step out of these alternative classroom spaces. For youth who have dropped out of the traditional system, what was the nature of the writing they produced in an alternative literacy learning space and what relationship did it have to their development as young adults?Design/methodology/approach Using qualitative case study methodology, this paper explores the memorable writing produced in the context of a high school poetry class by six case study participants to understand its meaning in their lives over time. It is through a dialogic lens that this research makes sense of the relationship between the written words produced by these youth, their actions in and on the world in their early adulthood, and their moments of development as survivors of trauma and as civic actors.Findings Student discussion of what I describe as touchstone poems revealed how these poems functioned to reorganize experiences and memories for the case study participants that enabled them to feel increased agency in relation to their personal and socio-cultural struggles.Originality/value For these students who were perpetually labeled as at-risk, poetry class served as a space where they could collectively engage in positive risk-taking that held meaning in their lives after high school and catalyzed the development of agentive identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we discuss the specifics of reading fluency and provide suggestions for identifying when reading is fluent and when it is not. We then discuss the important role that reading fluency plays in the attainment of literacy achievement and briefly review research results that highlight the relationship between fluency and comprehension. This is followed by a discussion of reading fluency and comprehension data gathered by one of the authors in India that highlight the possibilities for the acquisition of fluent reading in those learning English as a second language. Following a review of strategies to assist middle and secondary teachers with the development of fluent reading in their students, we conclude with a discussion of word study strategies that promote syllabic and morphemic analysis. Such strategies aid readers in the development of word automaticity and encourage the development of fluent reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the Students Achieving Success and Inspiring Excellence (SASIE) program, an innovative, pre-collegiate mentoring program for underperforming high school students. Rooted in aThird Space theoretical framework, the goal of this university-community partnership is to boost literacy achievement while inspiring at-risk high school students to complete high school and pursue post-secondary educational opportunities. The program is comprised of a 2-week summer academy, weekly mentoring sessions, and professional development opportunities for high school teachers, all of which are designed to utilize students' out-of-school literacies to improve in-school performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the experiences of Andy, a working class adolescent exploring his gay identity, and the dialogical and transactional relationship he developed with Kristi, his senior-year English teacher, we argue that the teaching of reading and writing must be seen as more than the learning of discrete skills to enable future employment. On the contrary, all transactions with texts should be viewed as providing learners with a range of ways to scrutinize their lives and the lives of others. We suggest that by taking a transactional and dialogical stance on the teaching of English, teachers and learners become inquirers into and ongoing co-constructors of their individual and collective selves. Through dialogue with others, they simultaneously dialogue with themselves, becoming agents in the continuing formation of their many cultural lives. Specifically, we use the experiences described herein to show the unique and necessary presence of dialogical transactions in the lives of Andy and Kristi and the range of possibility and consequence these transactions provoked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literacy is an increasingly important factor as schools focus on improving student achievement. Literacy skills in reading and writing are critical components needed for both access to the general curriculum and for successful academic achievement. A key component of reading and writing is word identification, a skill deficit for many adolescent students with learning disabilities. This article describes how we implemented Words Their Way, an explicit, inductive instructional approach to teach phonemic awareness, spelling patterns, and morphology to students in a ninth grade literacy class in an urban high school. The orthographic knowledge learned through word study is applied to word identification skills used in reading and writing. The article explains how we adapted this program for adolescents who are struggling with reading and writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]