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Religion remains an aspect of culture often missing from picturebooks, based on the misunderstanding that religion has no place in U.S. public schools. This absence is particularly critical for books reflecting the lives of Muslim children, given the rising Islamophobia in the United States. A critical content analysis to examine representations of Muslim children in contemporary picturebooks set in the United States was conducted through a postcolonial lens. Islamic religious practices are integrated into the daily lives of Muslim children in these books for an audience of Muslim and non-Muslim readers. The books represent Muslim children and their families as culturally and religiously diverse, portray religious differences as resources for communities, and reflect the hybrid identities of Muslim children. The books serve as counternarratives, creating a space for Muslim authors and illustrators to voice and validate their life experiences for a broad audience of readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated how children make meaning as they read historical fiction picturebooks. Three teachers and a total of 61 students from three different regions of Indonesia participated. We collected field notes, video recordings, and artifacts through read-alouds and subsequent response activities. The findings show that students explored the books by actively engaging in conversations about misconceptions of gender and schooling, connections of the past and the present, and negotiation of moral values and emotions within the fabric of Aceh Province’s history and Indonesian society. It highlights that historical fiction picturebooks can encourage students to think critically about their history and culture to make sense of the world they live in today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a consensus in research and practices that social and cultural aspects of lives contribute to literacy development, particularly in second language learning. The conception of literacy has been shifting from the lens of formal literacy learning in school settings into broader opportunities in sociocultural contexts, and some may exclusively look at the intersection between the two. In this article, I discuss the concept of continuities of literacy development and out-of-school literacy practices by carefully interpreting empirical research that have been done in the last decade. The discussion in this article enriches the notion of literacy learning that diverse settings of literacy practices, parents' role, and various available texts are significant predictors to the continuities of literacy development. I argue that ESL learners independently mediate their own literacy development either at school or community by taking advantages of rich opportunities available at the environment, which explained novice-expert relationship, hybridity, and intertextuality.

The research addresses three research objectives: (1) to identify learning strategies of writing skill used by senior high school students in Indonesia, (2) to measure the extent of use of the strategy categories, and (3) to study the differences in the use of the strategies by successful and less successful learners. The subjects of the study were 766 second year senior high school students in East Java, Indonesia. They were asked to complete a questionnaire of strategies of learning writing skill and a self-assessment. The results of the data analysis using Principal Component Analysis yielded twelve components with an initial eigenvalue greater than 1, explaining a cumulative variance of strategies 57.68%. The component matrix was rotated using Varimax with Keiser Normalisation Method and the resulting factors were then treated as posteriori strategy categories and named self-monitoring, language-focusing, planning, metacognitive affective, cognitive compensation, self-evaluating, social process-focusing, authentic practicing, meaning-focusing, vocabulary developing, metacognitive commencement, and mental processing strategies. All of these strategies were used at the moderate frequency level. Finally, successful learners reported using the strategies more frequently than less successful learners did. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]