Research in the Teaching of English

Although a growing body of research recognizes the importance of viewing argumentation as a means of understanding rather than combating others, little is known about how teachers cultivate this practice in classroom conversations when teaching argumentation. This study examines how argument can be taught in classroom discourse with an empathizing stance and generates associated pedagogical constructs. Adopting a microethnographic approach to discourse analysis, this study examines the key instructional events in an argumentative writing unit in two high school English language arts classes. The analysis demonstrates that the empathizing stance is introduced in the relationship between arguers and their warrants and the differences existing between arguers. It also generates four pedagogical constructs related to the teaching of argument with the stance: (1) identifying the connection between arguers’ warrants and backgrounds; (2) transposing oneself into others’ backgrounds; (3) exploring interlocutors’ common and divergent grounds; and (4) situating argument in a broader context. It concludes with a discussion of the affordances of teaching argument with an empathizing stance.

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Recent scholarship has demonstrated the need for criticality toward writing assessments that privilege standard language ideologies and correctness-based approaches. However, teachers continue to experience discrepancies between their intentions and actions, struggling to address both content and form in facilitative, constructive commentary. This study uses the activity theory framework of pedagogical tools, composed of conceptual and practical tools, to analyze through interviews and commented-on papers how two college composition graduate instructors responded to student writing. This study finds that while one teacher held and enacted consistent and congruent pedagogical tools grounded in sociocultural theories of writing development, the other experienced entrenched conflict between competing beliefs about evaluative and process-oriented purposes for teaching writing. These contrastive experiences illustrate how instructors’ development of pedagogical tools is mediated by interactions between their epistemological orientations and language ideologies, reinforcing the need to surface tacit beliefs about Standardized English and academic writing. This study concludes with recommendations for productive intervention in novice composition teachers’ development of response practices.

Children’s literature contains shared meanings that not only reflect societal norms, but also reinstate and reconstitute societal norms. This study used critical content analysis methods grounded in place theory to analyze the textual constructions of rurality in 52 contemporary, middle grade, realistic fiction novels set in US rural places. Findings revealed five salient themes, three of which are discussed in this article: systems work to keep rural people in poverty; rural people have deep connections to place; and rural people have diverse, intersectional identities. While some middle grade books in the sample move toward challenging stereotypes of rural places as monolithic (e.g., White-majority, socially conservative) by including nuanced portrayals of some characters of color, LGBTQ+ characters, and characters with disabilities, others rely on simplistic and otherwise problematic representations, using familiar tropes about rural people that suggest racial and cultural homogeneity privileging Whiteness and making invisible BIPOC in rural communities. Given the powerful impact of stories on identity formation and sensemaking, this study analyzes textual representations of rural people and places in books for middle grade readers.

Dignity is an important construct for all students, especially those whose voices and perspectives have been historically relegated to the margins because of their racial, ethnic, and linguistic identities. With recent legislation that stands to further calcify the systemic oppression and racial violence that remains so deeply entrenched in US schools, it is urgent to understand how minoritized students broker dignity—or feelings of self-worth, value, and well-being—while navigating multiple and oftentimes intersectional keloids of dehumanization. Currently, we know very little about how dignity is developed and enacted by students within educational settings, and even less attention is paid to how literacy factors into these engagements. To address this gap, my paper is guided by the following inquiry, explored within the context of a yearlong youth participatory action research class: How do BIPOC, middle school youth leverage critical literacies and epistemologies to negotiate dignity? Data for this paper, which were drawn from a larger, critical ethnographic study, were analyzed using what I name as a literacies of dignity framework that utilized theories of critical literacies (Freire, 1970/2000; Janks, 2013), felt dignity (Gallagher, 2004; Stephens & Kanov, 2017), and youth epistemologies (Filipiak, 2020; Green et al., 2020; Kelly, 2023) to explore how middle school youth examined and critiqued three sites of devaluation: media, schooling, and adult/youth relationships. Findings reveal important ways youth were able to reimagine ways of being together and caring for one another in social, educational, and even global contexts that rendered them disposable, leveraging critical literacy engagements to broker moments of collective intimacy and vulnerability. This, in turn, fueled their sense of dignity, offering important implications for justice-centered literacy education.

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Yonas Mesfun Asfaha is an associate professor at Asmara College of Education in Eritrea, and recently he accepted the role of acting dean of the College of Education. He is a well-known literacy scholar specializing in African literacies as well as multilingual language policy as it relates to education. Lydiah Kiramba is an associate professor at the University of Nebraska and is originally from Kenya. Her areas of expertise include multilingual and ESL education, language and literacy teaching and assessment, and bi/multiliteracy development. Lydiah Kiramba talked with Yonas Asfaha via Zoom during the spring/summer months of 2023 about epistemologies and ontologies that have significantly influenced his work.

The recent speculative turn in literacy, English education, and other ELA-related fields has brought renewed energy for redesigning English teaching and learning through genre awareness. However, extant work on speculative genres of reading, writing, and literary study assumes that ELA teachers are prepared or, more fundamentally, aware of these genres and their unique features. Addressing this gap, this article presents a single intrinsic case of Carlos, a queer man of Color and bilingual elementary teacher, as he cultivated genre awareness through an interactive approach to genre pedagogy through restorying. Based on a rhetorical genre studies approach, Carlos’s case demonstrates how English teachers might expand their genre repertoire to include speculative genres and integrate them into their classrooms. This article concludes by advocating for the integration of speculative literacies into English teacher education, doing so to disrupt normative realities tied to white supremacy and homophobia within the field.

Using interpretive phenomenological analysis of oral history interviews, this study explored poetic experiences of nine US secondary English language arts teachers who participated in a month of online poetry writing during COVID-19. The manuscript explores how poetic relationality created space for these secondary English language arts teachers, mostly in rural school districts, to reflect on their realities during COVID-19. These teachers came to understand themselves not just as teachers but also as poets, an understanding that helped sustain them as they taught in digital contexts, during social distancing and school closures.

Drawing on a yearlong ethnography I conducted at a public, urban, comprehensive high school in the midwestern United States, in this article I analyze a classroom instructional conversation about gender and trans identities in a sophomore humanities (grade 10) course that combined English language arts and social studies. In the conversation, youth constructed temporalities (i.e., relationships among pasts, presents, and futures) that were out of sync with the temporalities sanctioned by the school. In doing so, they drew on ideologies about gender, religion, race, sexuality, and class. Yet different youth offered futures that were incommensurate, particularly because they clashed over whether temporalities were rigid, fixed, and unchangeable or fluid, variable, multiple, and thus open to change. Being out of sync signaled possibilities, but not guarantees, of more just futures and suggested a need for literacy educators and researchers to rethink the roles of (un)certainty, (in)stability, and (non)linearity in classroom instruction with respect to sexual and gender diversity. In making this argument, I integrate queer and trans theorizations of temporality and futurity with adolescent queer literacies scholarship, specifically the concept of literacy performances.

This interview was conducted on February 14, 2023. It is available in an English translation by Benjamin de Buen on the RTE webpage at https://t.ly/Rf7KX. David Poveda es profesor titular de universidad en el Departamento de Psicología Evolutiva y de la Educación, Facultad de Psicología de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Lleva algo más de dos décadas investigando a través de metodologías etnográficas y cualitativas un abanico amplio de cuestiones relacionadas con la educación y los procesos de socialización de la infancia y juventud contemporáneas.

This is the text of Alfredo Celedón Luján’s presidential address as delivered at the NCTE Annual Convention in Louisville, Kentucky, on Sunday, November 21, 2021.

Time and temporality are variously conceptualized and employed ubiquitously in both theoretical and empirical studies of education and literacy. Since education and learning are inherently defined as change over time, any theory of learning or education makes implicit or explicit claims about the nature of time. In this exploratory conceptual review / theoretical essay, temporal discourse analysis is used to identify the temporal claims operating in six studies drawing on six different theoretical framings: (1) predictive theorizing (Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002); (2) developmental theorizing (Sulzby, 1985); (3) sociocultural theorizing (Gonzalez et al., 1995); (4) critical literacy theorizing (Jones & Enriquez, 2009); (5) critical race theory (Solórzano & Yosso, 2001); and (6) queer theorizing (Schey, 2023). Each theorization brings theoretical, methodological, and practical implications related to how research might be conducted, what changes across time, how time operates, and what might be tracked across time. Theorizations of time have substantive implications for what happens in classrooms and how what happens is interpreted by teachers, students, and researchers.

Against the backdrop of White Christian nationalism, which fomented an intensifying atmosphere of religious marginalization and violence toward transnationals in the US between 2015 and 2020, and in the context of teachers responding to this atmosphere of marginalization and violence with their writing curriculum and pedagogies, this study compared how three transnational youth wrote to express religious being and belonging in secondary classrooms. Adapting portraiture research approaches in a narrative study, we explored the how, who, and why of transnational youth writing across three classrooms where teachers made room for their cultural identity meaning-making through composing in diverse modes, genres, and media. In dialogue with pluriversal theorizing about the religious, specifically individual experiences of religious being and collective experiences of belonging, the research composed and compared portraits across three different public school settings. Working with three previously generated data sets, we retroactively asked: How, for whom, and to what purposes did three transnational youth express religious being and belonging through writing in public US secondary classrooms? The portraits illuminate how these youth wrote to accurately portray Islam, to poetically express and analytically discuss the fears and vulnerabilities Muslim women experience in wearing the hijab, and to share and interpret Christian familial experiences with ethnoreligious violence. In conclusion, we highlight complexities and further questions facing literacy teachers seeking to cultivate curiosity about youths’ religious being and belonging and to make room for these aspects of students’ experience as part of cultural assets approaches to writing curriculum and pedagogy.

This interview was conducted on February 14, 2023, and is published in the original Spanish in volume 58, issue 1 of Research in the Teaching of English. It was translated into English by Benjamin de Buen. David Poveda is associate professor at the Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology, School of Psychology of the Autonomous University of Madrid. He has been using ethnographic and qualitative methodologies for over two decades to study a wide range of educational and socialization processes of contemporary childhood and youth.

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The field of children’s literature has been adversely affected by the current alarming resurgence of book banning across the United States. Book banning has become the grandstanding stage for individuals on different political platforms to institute their desire to silence issues and people; most of these banned books share experiences that differ from mainstream white society. In their zest to muzzle others and create a dogmatic uniformity to a majority white mainstream, some parents and their political allies have targeted books they deem inappropriate, books that celebrate the kaleidoscope of races, cultures, and mores that make up the US. This essay examines the current wave of banning children’s books and the reasoning behind this trend. I argue that this trend of reader suppression seeks to silence minoritized voices and prevent critical conversations. Finally, I make a call to action for educators to share diverse stories so young readers, especially Black and Brown children, can see representations of themselves in books and other media.

Socio-cultural and practice-based approaches to literacy, associated with the (New) Literacy Studies, having emerged in the 1980s, nowadays are an established research field. Based on in-depth research, in many contexts and countries, the (New) Literacy Studies has much to offer to teachers and policymakers. And yet this impressive body of work has had little impact on policy. Taking as my example England, I ask what research has shaped policy in the past 30 years and why socio-cultural and practice-based studies have been ignored. Thus, I address the question of where the field has been and where it should go to from the point of view of its relationship with policy. My focus is on the initial teaching of literacy in primary (elementary) schools. I discuss three factors which I believe contribute to our struggles to influence policy: the policy environment itself and how it has changed; the wider economy of literacy research and what knowledge counts in the interface between research and policy; and, finally, the role of the media and public discourse in the relationship between research and policy. I end with questions about what we may have missed and where the field might want to go.

I offer a meditation on current challenges faced by literacy educators and researchers and uses those challenges to suggest new directions for the field. Citing the precipitous decline in interest in the humanities and the field of literacy education, I consider the significance of tools such as ChatGPT for the teaching of writing. I explore the significance of out-of-school literacies and the linguistic diversity of today’s students in terms of their implications for literacy instruction. I also remind us of the chilling political climate in which we find ourselves, especially with regard to LGBTQ+ identities. Given these contemporary challenges, I suggest that we in the field of literacy education rethink the nature of writing instruction, restructure our research paradigm to be more inclusive and democratic, and continue to be forceful political advocates for pedagogies, practices, and policies that will ensure a just and equitable literacy education for all.

This article posits the need for literacy research on teachers’ and students’ use of systems thinking for studying climate change. Drawing on sociocultural activity theory of learning, it perceives the need for engaging in systems thinking given the negative impacts of energy, transportation and community design, agriculture and food production, and economics and politics systems themselves on ecosystems—for example, the negative effects of fossil fuel energy systems on emissions production. Researchers could analyze teachers’ and/or students’ use of the following components derived from activity theory for analyzing these systems: objects and outcomes, roles, tools, rules and norms, and beliefs and discourses. For example, teachers and students may employ language for naming phenomena about climate change, responding to literature, engaging in media production, or using emissions mapping tools to critique status-quo systems and use those tools to portray ways of transforming those systems. They may also engage in critical inquiry of rules and norms or beliefs and discourses derived from capitalist economic systems that promote excessive consumption with detrimental environmental impacts and attempts in the political system to resist instruction on climate change.

This article discusses early literacy instruction in China, including the impact of biliteracy education on Chinese society. This presentation is based on interviews with over two dozen scholars of Chinese literacy instruction, as well as primary early grades language arts classroom teachers from four different regions across China. The purpose of this examination of literacy education in China is to open our views of literacy instruction beyond US borders, especially in those countries with different language/literacy systems. Because of the rapid increase of emergent bilingual students in our schools, we need to gain a better understanding of literacy and biliteracy education in the countries where those students grew up. On the one hand, this insight can help us realize the literacy practices that emergent bilingual students may bring to their learning in our classrooms and the importance of biliteracy as a requisite for our education. On the other hand, this understanding will urge us, both researchers and educators, to reexamine our beliefs and scholarship in reading or literacy education, and open our vision to the plurality of languages, multiple literacies, and diverse methods of literacy instruction beyond our land.

In the midst of multiple ongoing local and global crises, and persistently polarizing discourses about what should and should not be taught in classrooms and schools, we can draw inspiration and hope from thinking across boundaries to reimagine curriculum in English and literacies education. While curriculum has historically contributed to the gatekeeping and sorting of youth as well as perpetuating the status quo, it has also been transformative, expanding possibilities in how we think and express ourselves. In this essay, I examine how English language arts curricula have been and are currently defined, invoked, or imagined, highlighting how innovative research and practice across multiple sociopolitical and disciplinary boundaries can transform how curriculum is enacted and experienced. Drawing from assemblage theories, I present acurriculum-as-assemblagestance that renders visible the interrelatedness of such social, political, and socioeconomic discourses with the knowledges, identities, and literacies that are constructed and negotiated in the broader context of schooling. To illustrate what such a conceptualization can offer, I describe a practice approach to thinking about curriculum as it is enacted, experienced, and rhizomatically connected to the multiple identities and narratives of students and teachers. I argue that an interdisciplinary and transgressive stance toward English and literacies education can foster creative, inclusive, expansive, humanizing, justice-oriented, and joyful thinking forward about our field.

For the final In Dialogue of our editorial term, we wanted to invite some luminary voices in literacy studies to think together about the future of critical studies in literacy research. We asked Betina Hsieh, Danielle Filipiak, Tiffany Nyachae, David Kirkland, and Carol Brochin what they thought would push the field forward: What would or should literacy studies and English education look like in the future, including what collective priorities should be emphasized? We invited them to think together, to imagine what might be possible or necessary in a world that is on fire. In giving these scholars the “last word” of our editorial term, we are hoping that this effort toward intergenerational, collaborative knowledge building can be one of the seeds of hope that will help us grow toward a better future.

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In this article, I center the voices and experiences of Yazmin, Valeria, Guadalupe, and Monet, four escritoras that participated in Somos Escritoras, a creative space for Latina girls (grades 6–12) that invites them to share and perform stories from their lived experiences using art, theater, and writing as tools for reflection and examination of self and world. For two weeks, these escritoras created art and composed personal stories from their lives that addressed the tensions and contradictions at the intersections of age, language, culture, and ethnicity they navigate daily as Latina girls. For my inquiry, I explored the following questions: How do Latina/Chicana girls use writing and art to describe their experiences, histories, and identities? What can we learn from their voices? In their embodied art and writing, the girls wrote toward the foundation that their mothers had paved for them through their hopes and dreams, sometimes deferred. Rewriting narratives of self, the girls drew on creative acts to examine their lives and reclaim their experiences. Theorizing the future, the girls construct a world for themselves rooted within the stories and voices of their ancestors and those of the writers, poets, and storytellers whose writing has carved out a place for us in the world. Their words offer important perspectives into the ways that we design spaces and literacy curriculum that centers their intellectual, cultural, and gendered ways of knowing and being as important resources for teaching and learning.

Research has shown the benefits of peer interaction to scaffold learning of disciplinary literacies. We extend knowledge in this area to examine peer interaction and the affordances it creates when emergent bilinguals engage with multimodal texts in disciplines to make meaning. Using discourse analysis of the interactions of a small group of third graders carrying out a project in science class, we explored how four emergent bilinguals collaborated to design, produce, and distribute traditional and alternative texts. We found that translanguaging and transmodal collaborative structures support learning processes and comprehension to make sense of and contextualize disciplinary knowledge. A dynamic and recursive translanguaging pattern emerges in which the introduction and contextualization of knowledge happens in Spanish, the interaction occurs mainly in English, and the creation is in both English and Spanish. We discuss the affordances of these collaborative structures for supporting students in science and promoting Spanish and student bilingualism.

In this study, I draw upon ethnographic methods to explore three multilingual international students’ first-semester linguistic functioning in their college writing classrooms and beyond. Through the lens of superdiversity (), I investigate participants’ experiences beyond their shared membership as Chinese international students and unpack within-group variabilities in relation to their language and literacy backgrounds. The findings indicate that multilingual international students’ varying high school experiences are likely to position them at different acculturative stages for overseas studies; it is crucial to understand their superdiversity beyond the traditional paradigms of supporting “ELLs.” The findings illustrate that superdiversity plays an important role in complicating our understandings of multilingualism and multilingual student support in American higher education. I argue that recognizing and understanding superdiversity is important for both multilingual international students and their teachers. All college educators across the disciplines must go beyond simply acknowledging the existence of superdiversity. Instead, they must explicitly teach it to combat the zero point of English (). This article outlines hands-on pedagogical activities to facilitate new arrivers’ smooth linguistic transition in college and achieve linguistic empowerment by debunking monolinguistic assumptions.

With funding from the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Marva Cappello, Jennifer D. Turner, and Angela M. Wiseman convened a group of critical multimodal scholars in April 2022 to initiate a national agenda that prioritizes the use of visual and multimodal methodologies to promote educational equity and racial justice for youth of color. Our conference gathering included Reka Barton, Darielle Blevins, Justin Coles, Autumn A. Griffin, Stephanie P. Jones, Alicia Rusoja, Amy Stornaiuolo, Claudine Taaffe, Tran Templeton, Vivek Vellanki, and Angie Zapata. The dialogue presented in this article centers around a collaboratively composed image (see ) created three months after our initial convening. Participants from the conference chose an image that reflected our time together and represented our hopes and dreams moving forward. Inspired by kitchen-table talk methodology (), we share our ideas through images and text reflecting on how critical visual and multimodal methodologies facilitate access, equity, and hope in education and educational research.

Drawing on critical theories of labor and commodification, this qualitative embedded case study explores how students experience alienation and intimacy in the work of writing for an English language arts class. Analysis of fieldnotes from 30 observations, student writing products, and reflective interviews with focal students and the teacher illuminated the meaningful assemblages where conditions of intimacy permeated instruction. Two practices supported intimacy in working conditions: knowledge about writing built through a collective process of noticing, and open-ended work time characterized by “managed nonmanagement” (, p. 176), or calculated flexibility in rules and expectations. Findings illustrate how a literacy practice might contribute to students’ experience of alienation or intimacy (or both) while writing, depending on conditions of industrialization and commodification. Even as the teacher strove to deindustrialize work, commodification through grades and standardized assessments heightened alienation in the writing environment. The study provides an example of an educational context governed by an industrial system of assessment where local actors (the teacher and students) disrupted alienation by working in smaller scales and more closely with texts.

Set in one of the least privileged neighborhoods of the US Southeast, this research project took a discourse analysis approach to construct a day-in-the-life case study. It illustrates how, during an after school storybook cooking class, a 7-year-old, multilingual, Mexican American girl navigated local linguistic microaggressions and extended microaffirmations to her peers. At the same time, she contested and critiqued societal power imbalances associated with whiteness. This study widens the corpus of scholarship that has primarily examined children’s sociodramatic play and literacy development in preschool settings. It also broadens the body of research that has predominantly focused on students’ linguistic dexterity and metalinguistic awareness in middle and high school contexts.

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This bibliography includes abstracts of selected empirical research studies as well as titles of other related studies and books published between June 2013 and May 2014. Abstracts are only written for research studies that employed systematic analysis of phenomena using experimental, qualitative, ethnographic, discourse analysis, literary critical, content analysis, or linguistic analysis methods. Priority is given to research most directly related to the teaching of English language arts. Citations in the "Other Related Research" sections include additional important research studies in the field, position papers from leading organizations, or comprehensive handbooks.

This paper highlights the perspectives of first-generation students of color in their first year of college, and the ways in which they exercised agency in their writing. Framed by definitions of agency as mediated action that creates meaning, the paper reports on qualitative data collected from a summer writing program for first-generation students and students of color, and from writing samples and follow-up interviews with six students who participated in the summer program. Findings suggest that students in their first year of college leveraged their social and discoursal identities to offer new ways of understanding an issue. They also wrote using a translingual approach, integrating different discourses and forms of knowledge, and challenging views of academic writing as monolithic. The findings also suggest the link between awareness and action, meaning that what and how students wrote were informed by their awareness of writing and awareness of themselves as writers and cultural beings. The study’s findings have implications for advancing more nuanced views of agency and academic literacies, and redesigning writing instruction at the high school and college level.

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