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Drawing from theories of identity, language, and race, we conceptualize gateway moments to literate identities in high school English language arts classrooms enrolling language-minoritized youth. Gateways were interactions that afforded particular kinds of literate identities for youth. Deficit literate identities often invoked racialized language and literacy ideologies; authoritative literate identities engaged youths' full cultural and linguistic repertoires to create and critique knowledge. Occasionally, youth enacted authoritative classroom literate identities alongside or in response to dominant deficit frames of their literate abilities during planned and spontaneous classroom interaction. We note in each type of gateway opportunities for teachers to open space for youths' authoritative knowledge-producing literate identities. We aim to illustrate how a single instructional choice or classroom interaction ranges in effect from maintaining and reinforcing oppressive legacies and deficit literate identities to centering youth and their language and literacy repertoires in learning experiences for more socially just interactions and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By crafting a dramatic script about struggling high school readers that I then shared with real students in my Reading classes, I applied Arts-based education research (ABER) methods. Through the writing, presentation, collection, and reflection on student feedback, as well as during the script rewriting process, I was allowed to engage in a unique and motivating research experience. This approach allowed me to attend to three challenges with my Dissertation in Practice (DiP). First, instead of being part of this big, scary, abstract world called ‘research’, it allowed me to demonstrate inquiry though a means that I was more familiar and confident with—writing and theatre. My confidence working in these areas allowed me to initiate and remain engaged throughout the dissertation work. Second, it allowed me to take on a problem in my practice—the skepticism of many high school students in Reading classes about being in those classes. This helped me better understand my students, and thus inform and guide in the identification of best practices. Third, it positioned me to work with colleagues and administrators in my building and across our school district to rethink how we offer reading support to the heterogeneous cross-section of students who currently are being identified as needing such support. This account summarizes my DiP and, I hope, positions other classroom teachers who double as EdD students to imagine new and effective ways forward as they engage with problems of practice.

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]

This article explores how one urban high school under threat of state closure developed a multifaceted literacy program to transform the teaching and learning of literacy in a novel university/school partnership. Analyses of ethnographic and quantitative school data illustrate how the evolution of the literacy program could be understood as a consequence of generative frictions which produced changes in the program and some indication of changes in understanding of literacy and of students' needs. We weave a story of multiple layers of changed curriculum, scheduling, assessments, and pedagogy to argue that we need to rethink the continuum of autonomous and ideological literacy to focus more on what the intersections of literacy ideologies generate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of research has highlighted the important role attitudes play for adolescent readers, but few have examined differences in attitudes across purposes and contexts. With shifts in literacy moving students' reading habits from traditional texts (e.g., books and magazines) to more digital contexts, it becomes necessary that we investigate how students' attitudes differ by context and purpose. For the present study, we identified latent profiles of readers based on four different types of reading attitudes. Data from over four thousand middle school students in the United States were analyzed. Our analyses produced four stable and interpretable profiles of readers: (1) print preferred readers, (2) willing readers, (3) reluctant readers, and (4) avid readers. These latent profiles suggest that both purposes for reading and modes of reading play a role in shaping and developing attitudinal profiles of adolescent readers in the twenty-first century. We discuss in detail how our study contributes to an evolving understanding of digital literacies in today's adolescents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language learning is context-dependent and requires learners to employ different sets of language skills to fulfill various tasks. Yet standardized English as a foreign language assessments tend to conceptualize English proficiency as a unidimensional construct. In order to distinguish English proficiency as separate context-driven constructs, I adopted a register-based approach to investigate academic English proficiency (i.e., specific set of language skills that support academic literacy) and general English proficiency (i.e., wide range of language skills undifferentiated by context that are measured by traditional assessments) as separate predictors of overall essay quality. In the study, students completed a general English proficiency assessment and an academic language proficiency assessment, and essays were coded for academic writing features at the lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels. Beyond the contribution of academic writing features and general English proficiency, academic English proficiency emerged as a significant contributor to essay quality. Findings suggest that academic English proficiency scores more precisely identified a subset of academic language skills that is relevant to essay writing. The article concludes by discussing implications for strategic writing instruction that articulates the key expectations of academic writing used in and beyond school contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the emphasis on increasing the frequency with which students engage in analytic writing, we know very little about the ‘writing diet’ of adolescents. Student notebooks, used as a daily record of in-class work, provide one source of evidence about the diversity of writing expectations that students face. Through careful examination of the notebooks written by four middle-graders in 12 content area classrooms (290 texts), the present study help us to understand the ways in which these writers were acclimatized in one school year to the norms of writing in these diverse disciplinary contexts. In particular, results of this study suggest that adolescent writers may be afforded little opportunity to produce cognitively challenging genres, such as analytic essays. Notably, in content area classrooms, students engaged in very little extended writing.

Learning to write analytic genres may be particularly challenging for middle grade students because of the infrequency with which they are tasked with producing these types of texts

In this paper, we examine the relationship between student engagement and social studiesliteracy, exploring the possible connections between students’ reading interests and practices andsocial studies learning. With a sample of 802 secondary students from five schools in one urbancommunity, we use complementary methods to explore survey and interview data. Descriptiveanalysis of survey data indicated that study participants often perceived social studies educationin school as boring and irrelevant. Nevertheless, qualitative analysis of interview data from asubsample revealed that many young people describe using texts to explore dimensions of theiridentities as well as themes of struggle and conflict. We use these findings to illuminateconnections between youths’ concerns and interests and the enduring problems taken up by thesocial sciences, arguing that attention to these connections has the potential to engage studentsand develop their thinking and literacy practices in the social studies.

Content-area standards foreground the importance of reading and writing across the disciplines. With this in mind, it is important to examine the beliefs and practices of teachers who successfully integrate literacy in content-area courses in order to provide models for others. This paper examines beliefs and practices of two novice secondary history teachers as they worked to incorporate literacy instruction into their classrooms. Findings of this study revealed that participants believed literacy was vital to their discipline and enacted these beliefs by infusing course content with literacy through engaging students with writing, creative projects, and reading tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the persistence of anti-Blackness, the author demonstrates what can happen when Blackness takes precedence over anti-Blackness in an 11th-grade English classroom. This study uses critical autoethnography to explore a collaborative approach to teaching and learning that sustains Blackness. The author uses storying to amplify the significance of relationship building between a Black teacher and a Black teacher-researcher. This research further provides tools for transforming classrooms into sites of hope, healing, and resistance in a time when Black lives matter more than ever. In closing, the author offers the framework of justice-oriented solidarity (JOS) and highlights the power of cocollaboration to create an antiracist learning environment that sustains Blackness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most recent two decades in Senegal have been witness to a large shift of social communication norms, accessibility of information communication technologies (ICTs), and growth of ICT networks. Use of mobile phones in rural areas in Senegal is substantial– the penetration rate is 44.6% in 2008 (ITU, 2009). Increased cell phone usage is matched by expanding network coverage and the emergence of several competing operators.2Basic use of mobile phones in rural areas is widespread, but sending SMS and accessing the Internet by mobile phone is much less common (ITU, 2009). The possibility to expand SMS usage in rural communities throughout Senegal is large as text messaging remains the least expensive form of communication over distance. In addition, a significant portion of the rural Senegalese population migrates for work (on average each household reported 5 of their family members currently living and working outside Senegal).Senegalese out-migration flows are dominated by men ages 15-34 and thus this youthful population is of prime age for developing communication patterns which incorporate text messaging (UNDP Human Development Statistics, 2009)3. SMS text messaging can provide a low-cost solution to communicate with the diaspora. (see Appendix 3). However, the usage of mobile phones as a communications strategy can only be functional if all members of the community understand how to use, and have access to, a cell phone, as well as read and write messages. A very high share of women and teenage girls in rural Senegal lack both access to a mobile phone and the literacy skills needed to text message. In our study, only one in 8 female respondents owned a cell phone, less than half the rate for men. In addition, over 40% of the female respondents had no literacy or numeracy skills, again almost double the rate for men. Thus, the gender bias in literacy and numeracy skills and cell phone ownership must be addressed for equitable inclusive growth using ICT. We report on a pilot study in 20 communities of adding cell phone literacy and a free “SMS Community Forum” to an adult literacy and numeracy program. Overall results are promising, but the SMS Community Forum is not yet achieving all of its goals.

This paper explores different ways in which teachers use film as a medium for literacy instruction in secondary settings across different content areas in the American public school system. Three educators participated in an ethnographic interview study serving as a pilot for further enquiry. Educators represented two sites in the southern United States, working in two different subject areas with students aged 12 to 16. Interviews were coded using multiple methods and five themes resulted from the data, focusing on the different ways in which teachers used film-based content, as well as what they observed about their students based on their experiences with film in the classroom.

This study explores the disciplinary literacy perspectives of middle school students of color attending urban parochial schools and the reader subject positions they took up across content-area classrooms. Qualitative analysis of 19 student interviews and accompanying observations of subject-area classes revealed that students' constructions of reading, circumscribed by classroom literacy activities, inhibited discipline-specific reading subject positions. In particular, this study highlights how teachers' reading activities promoted reading as being about accomplishing a task rather than being apprenticed in ways of taking discipline-specific knowledge from text. When the boundaries between students' home literacy experiences and school disciplinary literacy experiences were more contiguous, and when more meaningful, authentic literacy experiences were provided, students evidenced deeper disciplinary literacy engagement. Educational implications, including troubling disciplinary knowledge to open the disciplines to wider ways of knowing and learning for all learners, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the impact of the sociodemographic profile (including age, gender, and educational track) of Flemish adolescents (aged 13–20) on lexical aspects of their informal online discourse. The focus on lexical and more "traditional," print-based aspects of literacy is meant to complement previous research on sociolinguistic variation with respect to the use of prototypical features of social media writing. Drawing on a corpus of 434,537 social media posts written by 1,384 teenagers, a variety of lexical features and related parameters is examined, including lexical richness, top favorite words, and word length. The analyses reveal a strong common ground among the adolescents with respect to some features but divergent writing practices by different groups of teenagers with regard to other parameters. Furthermore, this study analyzes both standardized versions of social media messages and the original utterances (including nonstandard markers of online writing). Strikingly, different results emerge with respect to adolescents' exploitation of more traditional versus digital literacy skills in relation to their sociodemographic profile, especially with respect to sentiment expression (verbal versus typographic/pictorial). The study suggests that the inclusion of nonverbal communicative strategies, for instance in language teaching, might be a pedagogical asset, since these strategies are eagerly adopted by teenagers who show proof of less developed traditional writing skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The film-based practices of four social studies teachers were examined using a qualitative methodology. The research interviewed teachers twice over a 2-month period, collected handouts, and collected audio-recorded teacher logs. Three of the teachers taught social studies primarily, while a fourth teacher was responsible for both English and social studies content. The findings indicate that teachers used film in addition to a wide range of other visual practices. Teachers used film actively rather than passively to facilitate dialogic connections, as well as elicit thinking about their content areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study presents findings from an academic literacy intervention programme targeting Arabic-native-speaking seventh-graders. Ninety-two pupils were assigned to either print (36 pupils) or computerized (30 pupils) learning platforms, whereas the remaining pupils (26) were in a control group. Three academic vocabulary knowledge tests (receptive, productive and application in context) and a reading comprehension test were administered before and after intervention. Additionally, prior to intervention, both experimental groups were assessed for Arabic diglossic context awareness. Following intervention, higher improvement in vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension was observed as compared to the control group. No significant differences were found between the two learning platforms. Awareness of Arabic diglossic context predicted 26% of pupils' performance on the application pre-test, 18% of their performance on the receptive pre-test and 10.4% of their performance on reading comprehension. Gender effects were also noted with girls outperforming boys. The study results point to the benefits of an academic literacy intervention on promoting performance of Arabic-native-speaking middle schoolers. Awareness of Arabic's diglossic nature and gender seem to modulate academic literacy performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entanglements among humans, nonhuman objects, and spatial matter in a research site necessitate greater attention to the interwoven and sometimes invisible connections across relational bodies. This piece comments on how reevaluating approaches to participant observations in qualitative research can lead to better understandings of the dynamic interconnectedness among participants, researchers, and observational tools. Drawing from the theory of thinking without method, this research explores the complexity of documentation in an out-of-school literacy setting and argues that ethico-onto-epistemology can highlight intersections between literacy researchers and technological attachments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the collective and differentiated effects of a remedial reading intervention, Corrective Reading Decoding Level B, on the reading skills and social adjustment of elementary and middle school students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) and learning disabilities (LD). Students were provided an average of three 40–45 min lessons per week over the course of nearly 4 months. Statistically significant reading skill improvements were found between students who received the intervention (n = 45) and those in the comparison condition (n = 23). The mean average basic reading skills of students with EBD (n = 10) improved from the low average range at pretest to the average range at posttest. Statistically significant differences were found between the posttest basic reading skills of students with EBD and their counterparts with LD (n = 35). Statistically significant reductions in the overall social adjustment problems and internalizing problems of participating students were found. The total problems of students with EBD moved from the clinical to the normal range at posttest. Except for performance on measures of oral reading fluency, students with EBD were significantly more responsive than their LD counterparts on measures of core reading skills, attention problems, ADHD Problems, and anxiety problems. Limitations, implications, and future research directions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Readers are increasingly exposed to text that includes both words and images through comics, graphic novels, online materials, and video games. In this study, we use the medium of the 4-panel comic strip to examine how readers make meaning of the word/image composite. We propose a cognitive interactive framework that incorporates both the bottom-up constraints of verbal and visual cues and top-down constraints imposed by global narrative structures to assess the contributions of each in the meaning-making process. Previous research has focused more on the qualitative and sociocultural approaches while this study uses cognitive and quantitative perspectives to explore the meaning making of text that includes both words and images. Results of our analyses show that both bottom-up and top-down constraints make significant and separable contributions to the variance in a comprehension task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws from a year-long ethnographic study documenting the use of comics in a school. Focusing on literacy work in a social studies classroom, it documents how comics were welcomed into and challenged classroom spaces. Comics were introduced, read, and engaged with collaboratively. While comics were able to support strategic practices, such as a standardized curriculum implemented by the school system, their presence and use in classrooms helped to surface teachers' and students' awareness of their typical rhythms. There were impacts to the ways in which students and teachers recognized and critiqued literacy practices in their school. By inviting a comic into their curriculum, teachers were also inviting changes to the space in which they and their students were learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing interest in foregrounding bodies in literacy research and pedagogy. Drawing across multiple conceptualizations of bodies as tools, mediums, and social texts, this qualitative case study examines the multifaceted nature of embodiment in two adolescent girls' school writing. Situated in a research-practice partnership that included researchers, the teacher, adolescent youth, and their parents, this analysis explores the ways writing acted with/on bodies throughout a poetry-writing unit in an urban middle school English language arts classroom. Data collected over 11 weeks included student and teacher interviews, observations and field notes, and artifacts. Through inductive coding processes, coupled with member-check interviews with participants and their parents, four themes were identified: (a) embodied knowing as inspiration for writing, (b) bodies as a mode of multimodal representation, (c) writing as a way to counternarrate against/with other bodies, and (d) bodies responding to writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic language is a kind of social language for the purpose of schooling. It is central to disciplinary learning, thinking, and communication. This study examined adolescents' use of academic language in informational writing, a genre highly valued in school, workplace, and society. Ninety-three seventh and ninth grade students from a U.S. public school were asked to write a science report based on a "wordless" picture book about a familiar class of animals called crocodylia. The student writing corpus was coded for presence of a constellation of academic language features. Statistical analyses of these data showed that (a) the adolescents made limited use of academic language features in their writing, (b) there were no significant differences between the two grade levels in academic language use, (c) there was a significant relationship between reading ability and academic language use, and (d) academic language use was a significant predictor of writing quality. These findings highlight both the importance of and the need for more explicit attention to academic language in secondary literacy instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that for disciplinary literacy to be addressed successfully by subject-area teachers and students, it needs to choose a different path than the one it has been on. It explains how the road disciplinary literacy has traveled to date has been marked by justifiable subject-area teacher resistance to requirements to infuse literacy teaching and learning strategies into their teaching without regard for disciplinary epistemologies or local perspectives. It argues for an alternative approach that immerses literacy experts in the hybridity of classroom disciplinary learning spaces with respect for literacy and disciplinary discourses as well as school and community subcultural beliefs, practices, and resources. It examines the ways such hybridity has been addressed by disciplinary literacy researchers in the Journal of Literacy Research to date, and it offers recommendations for advancing research, practice, and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nine preservice and in-service teacher participants from four different content areas experienced shifts in their personal perspectives regarding integration of literacy in their subject-area instruction after completing a content-area literacy course. The course was positioned as professional development and used situated learning to provide extensive time for modeling, guided practice, discussion, and constructive feedback. Due to the course set-up and strategies thoroughly practiced, all teachers demonstrated a significant increase in knowledge of literacy strategies and how to incorporate them within their classrooms. Additionally, hands-on instruction and situated participation in a community of practice promoted all teachers' desire to learn and eventual demonstration of learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Middle schools often mandate summer reading as a means of stemming summer learning loss, but research suggests that many students do not read any books during the summer months. Limited book access and difficulties self-selecting books are two barriers that can impact students' summer reading practices. To address these challenges, students in one Grade 7 classroom participated in an initiative designed to scaffold book choices prior to summer break and to increase students' access to high-interest books. Compared to students in a randomly selected business-as-usual classroom, students who participated in the book scaffolding initiative were more likely to read at least one book over the summer. The author describes ways in which dedicating class time to helping middle school students discover reading interests, coupled with providing free access to books, can impact summer reading practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a growing research base that explores motivational constructs in reading and their relationship to achievement, nuanced questions remain. The present study examines the complex relationships among attitudes, proficiency, grade, and gender. Attitudes were differentiated by purpose (recreational vs. academic) and medium (digital vs. print), and a survey comprising those four subscales was administered to 586 Korean adolescents. Results showed that attitudes toward Recreational Print, Academic Print, and Academic Digital reading are positively associated while attitudes toward Recreational Digital reading are negatively associated with the other three attitudes. We also found that reading attitudes significantly predicted reading comprehension scores. We discuss these results and suggest implications for adolescent literacy instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a sample of 7,752 fourth- to seventh-grade students in 25 schools which were randomized at the school level to condition, this article reports experimental impacts of an enhanced version of Word Generation on student outcomes at the end of Year 1 and of Year 2. Word Generation employs analysis, synthesis, critique, and problem-solving activities to build students' academic language, perspective taking, and ultimately their reading comprehension. Results indicate that the program improves the proximate outcome of academic vocabulary included in the curriculum after the first and second year of implementation for all students (Y1 effect size (ES) =.22, Y2 =.28 for fourth and fifth graders; Y1 ES =.13, Y2 =.16 for sixth and seventh graders). For those in the fourth and fifth grades, their perspective positioning skills also improved at the end of the first year (ES =.14), and their academic language skills (ES =.06), perspective articulation and positioning skills (ES =.12,.19), and reading comprehension (ES =.15) improved at the end of the second year. Among sixth and seventh graders, there were improvements in perspective positioning skills (ES =.19) and reading comprehension (ES =.10) at the end of Year 2. Effects after both Years 1 and 2 were stronger in high-exposure classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite evidence that youths' literacy practices and identities are important contributors to literacy learning, studies of secondary literacy instruction often focus on understanding classroom storylines from the perspectives of teachers and schools. The purpose of this case study was to examine how one youth, Leo, shaped the storyline of his one-on-one literacy tutorials by attending to his deviations from his tutor's storyline. Framed by theories of identity, agency, and positioning, findings indicate that deviations were acts of agency that manifested as collaborative authoring or improvisation and provided insights about Leo as a reader, writer, and person. Findings highlight the situated and collaborative nature of meaning-making and the importance of theoretically grounded literacy instruction that attends to how students negotiate their positions in relation to teachers' storylines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines teacher implementation of an adolescent literacy curriculum designed as an intervention for students reading two years below grade level. Specifically, this work focuses on the adaptations made by four experienced teachers in a single school that sustained implementation of this curriculum after the intervention trial had ended. Data were collected through observation and interview. An accounts of teaching practice methodology was used to define each teacher's orientation towards the curriculum, and then to determine whether this orientation demonstrated assimilation or accommodation to intervention principles. I found that the vast majority of time spent implementing the curriculum included adaptations, and that each teacher's adaptations were different, and reflected her pre-existing orientation towards literacy teaching. Although one teacher demonstrated assimilation and accommodation to intervention principles, the other three primarily demonstrated assimilation. These findings suggest the importance of understanding teachers' orientations towards curriculum in order to provide more tailored professional development which may help teachers accommodate to the most critical pedagogical features of a curriculum. This may be especially significant in considering sustained implementation, after research-related supports have been withdrawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research proposes Lesson Study as a professional development structure that allows principals and teachers in secondary schools to meet the demands of English and disciplinary literacy standards. It is a collaborative study between a university and eight schools. The essential questions is, "How can Lesson Study broaden content knowledge and affect instructional leadership?" Data are analyzed using qualitative methods. Findings suggest the possibilities of Lesson Study in creating principal teacher partnerships to address challenges of practice in today's schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Static reading labels are problematic not only because youths demonstrate varying reading skills and identities across secondary classrooms but also because being labeled as "struggling" can undermine literacy learning. Little research has investigated how "struggling" and "proficient" readers' interactions with shared classroom contexts may mediate their literacy in similar and different ways. In a school-year-long qualitative study, the first author shadowed eight struggling readers across classes in an urban high school and compared their literacy experiences with those of youths not labeled as such. Analysis of 46 interviews, using 425 hr of observations as contextualizing data, showed that interactions with school contexts contributed to students' positioning as struggling or proficient regardless, sometimes, of skilled reading. Proficient readers reported feeling that their perspectives were valued whereas struggling readers reported theirs were not. By documenting how contexts mediated youths' perspectives on reading, findings have implications for disrupting deficit labels and promoting socially just teaching. [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]

Academic language, which is characterized by the words and structure of the language of schooling, is an important teachable component of academic achievement. When compared to other strong predictors of academic achievement (e.g., decoding, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension), academic language is not as well understood or explicitly taught in schools. The purpose of this literature synthesis is to identify the instructional practices that currently have the best evidence to improve academic language and broader academic achievement outcomes. The most prolific study of academic language instruction occurs with English learner samples. In the current study, we sought high-quality empirical intervention studies conducted with English learners. We describe the components of instruction that explicitly address academic language skills, and we describe the impact on outcomes for English learner students as well as their English-only peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secondary literacy instruction often happens to adolescents rather than with them. To disrupt this trend, we collaborated with 12th-grade “literacy mentors” to reimagine literacy teaching and learning with 10th-grade mentees in a public high school classroom. We used positioning theory as an analytic tool to (a) understand how mentors positioned themselves and how we positioned them and (b) examine the literacy practices that enabled and constrained the mentor position. We found that our positioning of mentors as collaborators was taken up in different and sometimes unexpected ways as a result of the multiple positions available to them and institutional-level factors that shaped what literacy practices were and were not negotiable. We argue that future collaborations with youth must account for the rights and duties of all members of a classroom community, including how those rights and duties intersect, merge, or come into conflict within and across practices. [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.

With recent decades showing an increase in educational literacy scholarship attending to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer (LGBTQ) people and texts with LGBTQ themes, we sought to extend this scholarship through examining collaborative composition for public audiences beyond a classroom and school. We explored these composing practices through our ethnographically informed qualitative study of a semester-long LGBTQ-themed literature course for high school juniors and seniors, which we cotaught and coresearched. Ultimately, we found, through collaborative composing for public audiences, students and teachers in the LGBTQ-themed literature course had opportunities for interrogating oppressive values. When students and teachers shared vulnerability in that they shared responsibility for oppressive values, they embraced these opportunities. However, when students and teachers failed to share vulnerability but, instead, imposed it on a single individual, they squandered these opportunities. These findings underscore the importance of sharing vulnerability when working to interrogate oppressive values through collaborative composition for public audiences. [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]

Scholars contend that disciplinary literacy is a productive route for all secondary learners, including those identified as struggling readers, to build knowledge. Relatedly, scholars point to disciplinary literacy as a socially just alternative to decontextualized skill instruction and deficit positioning. Yet, little research has examined how instructional contexts facilitate these youths’ participation in disciplinary literacy practices. I present the case of one ninth-grade history classroom. Participants were three students and one teacher. Data sources included 48 hr of observations, 11 semistructured interviews, ongoing ethnographic open-ended interviews, and classroom artifacts. By closely examining the enactment of one lesson and situating the analysis in the class’s yearlong academic and social trajectories, I show how disciplinary literacy provided avenues for youths to wrestle with and critique historical texts, compare perspectives across sociohistorical periods, see themselves in history, and disrupt deficit positioning in school. I discuss implications for secondary literacy and social studies education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined adolescents’ perspectives on their multimodal composing goals and designs when creating digital projects in the context of an English Language Arts class. Sociocultural and social semiotics theoretical frameworks were integrated to understand six 12th grade students’ viewpoints when composing three multimodal products—a website, hypertext literary analysis, and podcast—in response to a well-known literary text. Data sources included screen capture and video observations, design interviews, written reflections, and multimodal products. Findings revealed how adolescents concurrently composed for multiple purposes and audiences during the literature analysis unit. In particular, students viewed projects as a platform to emotionally affect and entertain a broader audience, as well as a conduit through which they could represent themselves as composers. Emphasis was placed on creating cohesive compositions—ranging from close modal matching to building meaning at a thematic level and creating a multisensory experience indicative of the novel’s narrative world. These findings contribute a multidimensional understanding of adolescents’ various and interacting multimodal composing goals and have implications for leveraging modal affordances in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this action research study was to determine if a bibliotological approach to literacy with at-risk students met the educational expectations of a remedial reading course while simultaneously accelerating literacy practices and promoting positive youth development. Twenty-four tenth grade students enrolled in a remedial reading course in the southwestern USA participated in a nine-week instructional design that utilized young adult literature as a medium through which to practice literacy skills and strategies while exploring positive youth development simultaneously. Measurement protocols included diagnostic assessments of reading, surveys, Likert-scale inventories, and journals as a way of eliciting students’ voices. Data was analyzed through paired t-tests, Bonferroni Correlation, and typological and inductive coding. Through this approach, all students experienced an increase in self-efficacy, which led to positive youth development and growth in literacy proficiency and practices. Suggestions for future research include the study of this approach in multiple remedial contexts, with multiple young adult texts, and for greater lengths of time.  Additionally, a follow-up inquiry to determine potential lasting impact is warranted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]