Classroom Literacy Practices Research Articles

A Poetry Pedagogy for Teachers

This is a review of A Poetry Pedagogy for Teachers: Reorienting Classroom Literacy Practices by Maya Pindyck and Ruth Vinz, with Diana Liu and Ashlynn Wittchow. The authors, U.S-based poets, educators, and arts-academics, share a crafted master class in creative thinking and poetic confidence building for teachers. They employ a strongly collaborative stance, and take readers with them on a poststructural journey by weaving together a collection of poems, scholarly literature, and resources which aim to provoke their teacher-readers to write. Readers should ready themselves with pen and paper, notebook, or computer as the many ”Invitations” (writing exercises which appear at the end of each chapter and in a section of their own towards the end) will have readers sliding into poetry and seeing it in the most unexpected places.

Student teachers’ reflections on semiotics in Grade 3 isiXhosa literacy lessons

Background: Globally, teaching practice has been at the heart of teacher education programmes. For quality teaching and learning, literacy student teachers are expected to develop metacognitive attributes and critical thinking to integrate theory and practice. Because of the dominance of autonomous models in literacy teaching and learning nationally and internationally, literature continues to report poor literacy attainment, especially for indigenous language learners. Contrasting this deficit view, this article employed languaging as a lens to describe student teachers’ reflections on their interactions with Grade 3 learners using multimodal and linguistic repertoires, which they both bring from socio-cultural contexts as well as utilisation of embodied representational modes.Aim: To explore how Foundation Phase (FP) student teachers used languaging and semiotic modes to enhance literacy teaching and learning in Grade 3 classrooms.Setting: An Eastern Cape Institution of Higher Education.Methods: In this qualitative study, four purposely selected FP isiXhosa Home Language student teachers used reflective journals to articulate their individual and peer classroom literacy practices. Data were thematically analysed.Results: Findings revealed the importance of acknowledging authentic and diverse linguistic resources that learners bring from their socio-cultural backgrounds as well as the use of multimodal literacies in the classroom context.Conclusion: This study concludes that languaging allowed learners and student teachers to exploit multimodalities and linguistic repertoires that they bring from their socio-cultural backgrounds.Contribution: This study demonstrates the pedagogical literacy strategies that created live dialogical engagements between student teachers and learners. These can be useful to teacher educators as well as teachers in the Foundation Phase contexts and thus improve literacy teaching and learning, especially in indigenous languages.

Relationships between Reading Identities and Dialogue: Perspectives from Fifth-grade Multilingual Learners

Drawing upon a theoretical framework that acknowledges the bidirectional relationship between local discursive acts and institutional structures, this paper analyzes classroom observations with student interviews to understand how fifth-grade multilingual learners are making sense of dialogic literacy instruction to support their reading development. Findings reveal a relationship between how a learner’s identity with reading informs how they understand the utility of classroom dialogue to support reading development, and subsequently the degree to which they exert agency to engage in classroom literacy practices.

“Very easy, it’s an English class, therefore they should not rely on a French text”

Abstract In the context of additional language (AL) learning, teachers need to focus on the development of language proficiency as well as on high-level literacy skills, for example, comprehending and evaluating information and creating new meaning. From a plurilingual perspective, AL learners’ first language (L1) is conceputalised as a useful tool in the development of target language proficiency; however, limited information exists concerning AL teachers’ beliefs towards the use of the L1 for high-level literacy instruction despite its potential utility for complex skill development. The aim of the present exploratory study was to examine the beliefs of in-service teachers of English as an additional language (EAL) working in the Quebec primary and secondary school system in francophone Canada regarding plurilingual approaches for classroom literacy practices and to uncover the factors that influence their beliefs. An online survey was distributed to in-service EAL teachers (N = 57) working in the province of Quebec, Canada. Findings suggest that teachers believe that it is most beneficial to adopt a monolingual lens to literacy instruction, a belief that denies learners’ use of their L1 and this, in a bilingual country. Implications for teacher education programs that challenge a monolingual lens are explored.

Resistance to the infrastructure that governs local literacy and social practices in an English classroom

ABSTRACT This work looks at how the infrastructure or conventions of practice and social arrangements govern local classroom literacy practices and how marginalized students resist the infrastructure and expose institutional change-making possibilities. Drawing from a longitudinal study, we analyzed five days of lessons that constituted a project in order to attend to aspects of instruction and activity that were indicative of the infrastructure and whether, and if so, how, students used language, body, silence, etc., to disrupt these guiding practices. The questions that guide this work are the following: What does student resistance reveal about the institutional infrastructure in this classroom? How did youth exploit the infrastructure’s fissures and what does it reveal about racial wisdom? Our findings demonstrate how students navigated, negotiated, and addressed the institutional complexities that shaped this assignment and offered limited ways to navigate it. This work offers a broader understanding of what students’ enactment of resistance disrupts and provides a clearer understanding of student racial wisdom.

Exploring the structure and content of discourse in remote, rural South African classrooms

The nature of discourse within classrooms strongly predicts students’ ability to think about, around, and with text and content (i.e. comprehension and critical-analytic thinking). However, little is known about the nature of classroom discourse in remote, rural South African schools, a context in which students face well-documented language challenges. The central aim of the present study was to explore the structure and content of discourse in South African classrooms using the 4 components of the Quality Talk model as a frame for our exploration (i.e. instructional frame, discourse elements, teacher moves and pedagogical principles). Grade 8 student participants from 3 classes and their teacher were sampled. Data sources included individual student language assessments, digital video recordings of classroom literacy practices and field notes. Findings revealed that discourse was predominantly characterised by an efferent stance toward text, and the discussions were primarily teacher controlled and directed. There was little, if any, evidence of students’ critical-analytic thinking. Observations in terms of resilience and narratability as well as implications for research and practice are forwarded.

Engagement From the Periphery: Reconceptualizing Adult English Language Learners’ Resistance in Developmental Literacy

English language learners’ nonparticipation and reticence in adult literacy classes are often presented problematically from a deficit lens of student resistance and disengagement. This article draws from an ethnographic case study of Generation 1 learners, who are defined as adult-arrival immigrant learners, transitioning from an adult English as a Second Language class to a developmental literacy class. By examining learners’ resistance through a framework of agency enactment, the study bridges the fields of adult literacy and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, both of which support adult-arrival immigrants entering the U.S. education system. The resulting analysis illustrates how Generation 1 learners’ acts of resistance can be complex presentations of their literacy identities and their engagement in classroom literacy practices.

“A Type of Student They Actually Want”: Narratives from and about a Sixth-Grade Student with a Specific Learning Disability

This case study contrasts sixth-grade student Antonio’s perspective of himself as a “good student” with perceptions some of Antonio’s teachers held related to his classification as a student with a Specific Learning Disability and an English Learner as enacted in classroom literacy practices. With Antonio’s voice at the center, multimodal narratives woven from interviews and observations focus on the moments of tension where Antonio was not recognized as the type of student he saw himself to be. Through analysis of these scenes, I question the usefulness of both his “good student” identity and school designations of disability and English proficiency for Antonio and students who may be labeled in similar ways by schools.

Factors of Influence on Classroom Literacy Practices

Previous research has indicated professional training and support, personal literacy preferences, and professional literacy attitudes have an influence on classroom literacy practices. Limited literacy related research has been conducted in agricultural education. This study sought to examine the influence of professional training and support, personal literacy preferences, and professional literacy attitudes of agriculture teachers on current classroom literacy practices. Data was collected from in-service teachers in 35 states. The researchers determined a majority of agriculture teachers have completed professional training, have positive personal literacy preferences and positive professional literacy attitudes. They also use a variety of literacy activities in their classrooms. The use of PowerPoint presentations and traditional writing activities were the only practices determined to have a significant influencer. Recommendations for practice include encouraging agriculture teachers to develop relationships with the English/Language Arts department and offering professional development related to literacy assessment.

The Effect of Storytelling at School on Children’s Oral and Written Language Abilities and Self-Perception

This study explored whether being told stories by a teacher in school 4 days a week for 10 weeks would lead to improvements in 6- and 7-year-old children’s oral language, written language, and self-perception. We also explored whether these improvements would be greater than those experienced by an active comparison group that was read the same stories from books and a comparison group that continued with their usual classroom literacy practices. We used a quasi-experimental between-participants design: 194 participants took part, and classes (rather than participants) were randomly assigned to intervention conditions. Results showed that the storytelling group retold stories that were significantly longer and used a significantly wider range of vocabulary than both the group that was read the same stories and the comparison group at posttest and 3-month follow-up. The story-reading group scored significantly higher on an oral vocabulary test than the comparison group at follow-up.

I’m gonna get it for my birthday: Young children’s interpretive reproduction of literacy practices in school

In this paper, I argue that the mainstream assumptions that inform current educational policy and practice for young children’s in-school literacy development in schools are insufficient to secure a helpful account of young children’s classroom literacy practices. A particular problem lies with the reliance of such policy and practice on perspectives that assume, first, that literacy acquisition comprises the orderly acquisition of predefined concepts, skills and knowledge; and second, that the task of schools is to bring individual children’s concepts, skills and knowledge of literacy in line with what is considered ‘normal’ for their age. I argue that such perspectives are too narrow to secure a clear enough view of the complex phenomenon of young children’s encounter with being taught to read and write in school. In this paper, I present two alternative theoretical lenses through which the familiar phenomenon of young children’s encounter with being schooled in literacy can be viewed: first, that of Literacy as a Social Practice (henceforth LSP); and second, that of ‘interpretive reproduction’, a theoretical account of young children’s participation in their social worlds developed by William Corsaro. To demonstrate how helpful such perspectives can be in understanding the familiar phenomenon of young children’s literacy schooling, I apply them to the analysis of one child, Dean’s, encounter with schooled literacy within the social world of an early twenty-first century London classroom.

Track Star + thing power: Be(com)ing in the literacy workshop

This paper explores the intra-actions between and assemblages among classroom materials, a teacher's chair and a seven-year-old boy during a second grade literacy workshop. I consider the ways in which the relationships between the human and more-than-human produced multiple ways of being and, in particular, new modes of competence for a child whose classroom literacy practices were often considered illegitimate or unremarkable. Drawing on posthumanist and more-than-human philosophies of difference, I suggest that the child's affective relationships with materials and his teacher's willingness to engage in a nomadic pedagogy produced new opportunities for him to experience and demonstrate his literate selves and, subsequently, created a not-yet-experienced and unanticipated sense of belonging.

Taking interaction in literacy events seriously: a conversation analysis approach to evolving literacy practices in the classroom

ABSTRACTIn this article, I examine the relation between literacy events and literacy practices in classroom interaction and add to ongoing discussions in the field of NLS about the transcontextual nature of literacy and how local literacy events are linked to broader literacy practices. It specifically focuses on how the link between literacy events and literacy practices are maintained in the institutionally shaped classroom interaction. Conversation analysis (CA) is used to explore the interactional resources and social knowledge relied upon as teachers and students orient to literacy practices in everyday classroom interactions. The analysis focuses on a frequent type of teacher–student interaction during seatwork, desk interaction, i.e. interactions that occur as students work individually at their desks while the teacher moves around in the classroom to help and supervise them. The result shows how teachers and students refer to and use previously shared experiences of institutionally shaped literacy practices in the desk interactions, using both verbal and non-verbal resources. Thus, the literacy events in these interactions are shown both to be embedded in and contributing forward to the progressive shaping of classroom literacy practices that to a large extent seem to be practices of self-regulation and responsibility in individual assignments.

Towards translingual and transcultural practice: explorations in a white-majority, rural, Midwestern elementary classroom

ABSTRACTNew Literacy Studies and related scholarship on the use of digital tools in classrooms support the argument that literacy practices can be understood as translingual and transcultural practices within the context of an otherwise monocultural and monolingual setting. Pushing for broader conceptions of ‘mono’ settings and arguing for homing in on the unit of study as a means by which to unpack literacy practices, this paper makes the case conceptually as well as by offering insights from a recent classroom ethnography in a white-majority, English-only, high-poverty, rural sixth-grade classroom in the Midwestern United States. The paper considers the challenges of rural poverty and the complexities of using digital tools by examining the role digital tools, placed resources [Prinsloo, M. 2005. “The New Literacies as Placed Resources.” Perspectives in Education 4 (23): 87–98], play in marginalised settings. The data highlighted offer insights about how researchers and teachers might support and approach ‘mono’ elementary classroom literacy practices as drawing from across spaces as students engage with digital tools and global partners in what should also be understood as transcultural practice with the potential for translingual practice.

Writing their way into talk: Emergent bilinguals’ emergent literacy practices as pathways to peer interaction and oral language growth

This paper explores the idea that young children’s emergent literacy practices can be tools for mediating peer interaction, and that, therefore, literacy, even in its earliest stages, can support oral language development, particularly for emergent bilinguals. The paper draws on data collected during a year-long ethnographic study of 11 Nepali- and Turkish-speaking three- and four-year-olds learning English in their first year of school. Using neo-Vygotskian activity theory as a guide, this paper examines the children’s classroom literacy practices, particularly around writing and the alphabet, in order to understand, first, how literacy functioned as a socially embedded activity for these students (sometimes in ways that contrasted with the official literacy practices of the classroom), and second, how that activity facilitated students’ interaction across language backgrounds. Finally, this paper offers a genetic analysis, or an analysis across time, of how students’ interactions with multimodal composing functioned as contexts for emergent bilinguals’ oral language development, and in particular, vocabulary acquisition.

English language learners' writing behaviours during literacy-enriched block play

Despite the rising number of linguistically diverse students in countries where English is the primary medium of instruction in schools, there is a relative lack of research on how these students learn to write in English and respond to common classroom literacy practices. One practice found in early childhood classrooms is literacy-enriched play, but little research explores how young English language learners respond to this particular intervention. This exploratory study examines three linguistically diverse kindergarten students' use of writing materials in a literacy-enriched block centre in their classroom. Observational notes and writing samples produced by the students during block play were analyzed to determine the frequency and variety of their writing behaviours. The results indicated that all the students, regardless of language background, incorporated drawing and writing into their block play with similar frequency, although they sometimes used different writing strategies. These findings indicated that literacy-enriched centres can provide linguistically diverse students with meaningful opportunities to practice writing.

Classroom literacy practices in low- and middle-income countries: an interpretative synthesis of ethnographic studies

Surveys in low- and middle-income (LMI countries) reveal persistently low levels of learning among children in disadvantaged communities. Against this background, our synthesis of ethnographies aims at a fresh interpretation of classroom practices to clarify instruction-related barriers to literacy attainments. The review focuses on the period from 1990, the year of the UN Declaration of Education for All, to 2014. Sixteen studies focusing on children up to Grade 4 from eleven LMI countries met criteria for methodological rigour. The synthesis, structured within socio-cultural and psycholinguistic frameworks, examined vignettes of teacher- and child-initiated talk and activities related to language and literacy learning. Trends captured include instructions that are light on explanation, skewed towards reinforcing orthographic knowledge, and leaving the advancing of children’s broader linguistic and general knowledge to incidental learning. Learning from the peer group is common and, in bi- and multilingual settings, use of home language as a learning resource is uncommon. It is proposed that a cultural analysis of choral lessons, writing for learning, peer tutoring and community-specific preferences for language of instruction is required to understand whether embedding inference-focused interventions within these practices will promote more effective teaching and learning.

TV-school hybrid literacy practices as sites for making another logic possible: voicing contrasts that promote gender and sexuality trans-experiences


 Considering the relationship between media and sense-making in Brazil, the purpose of this article is to examine an interventionist collaborative ethnography in a specific literacy context – history classes in a Brazilian state school, in which the classroom teacher, two researchers, and 5th grade students conjointly try to decenter commonsense views of gender and sexuality. By making ample recourse to media texts and to radical hybridity, they work towards promoting classroom literacy practices which “de-ground” certainties by shaking them through border-crossing (Mignolo 2000) and triggering the negotiation of new perspectives for social life. By dramatizing cemented social voices and engaging in what we have termed trans-experiences, participants show that social matrices and solidified meanings do not simply impose themselves on individuals but live through microsociological encounters. This movement is made visible through a microanalytical approach that, capturing tenuous voicing contrasts indexed by register use, reveals a delicate, but significant, performative flux.

Telecollaboration in the secondary language classroom: case study of adolescent interaction and pedagogical integration

This study builds on research examining the in-school technology practices of adolescent language learners by exploring the patterns of classroom literacy practices that emerge when a telecollaborative project is introduced into a conventional secondary language classroom. We draw on the conceptual frameworks and discourse analytical tools developed by researchers of online communication practices at the post-secondary level and turn this lens to examine how an international online exchange project might contribute to the creation of an in-school learning environment in which adolescents use technology to interact with distally located peers through telecollaboration. The particular contribution of this study is twofold: to offer insight into patterns that characterize the literacy practices that emerge through the introduction of telecollaboration into the learning environment and to document the types of pedagogical decision-making that such projects introduce into the secondary context. Using a case-study design, we explored two central areas: (1) What patterns of interaction emerge in the literacy practices of adolescent students as they build relationships with their intercultural partners? (2) How do teachers address the pedagogical issues that are foregrounded when introducing innovative literacy practices such as telecollaboration into the secondary learning environment? Our premise is that online exchanges might offer a different kind of learning experience that provides opportunities for adolescents to engage with language in ways that do not typically get enacted in conventional language classrooms. Our interest therefore is grounded both in providing a rich, descriptive inventory of how adolescents engage with telecollaboration in the classroom context, as well as in documenting the types of pedagogical issues that are introduced. We offer a linguistically grounded portrait of what constitutes the interactional patterns and pedagogical issues in a classroom learning environment shaped by the introduction of an online intercultural project. Using a case-study approach, therefore, we provide close documentation and analyses of a 15-week, classroom-based telecollaboration project through student transcripts and focal teacher interviews. We conclude with a discussion of the empirical and pedagogical implications associated with integrating telecollaboration into secondary language classroom contexts.

Critical literacy in the first year of primary school: Some insights from Greek Cypriot classrooms

The current paper examines teaching practices in three first-grade primary classrooms (age range from five years and nine months old to six years and nine months old) in Greek Cypriot public schools, exploring whether the wider changes in critical literacy education declared on a policy level are influencing classroom literacy practices. Greek Cypriot public education has followed the language policies developed in Greece since the island gained independence in 1960. However, from 2010, there has been a full-scale educational reform in Cyprus at all levels of education, and for the first time, a critical literacy model has been implemented. Drawing data from research conducted into classroom practices and discourse, the current paper analyses literacy teaching in three Greek Cypriot classrooms, focusing on the materials used, the idea of textuality, the role of metalanguage and the notion of language legitimacy produced in the classroom. The overall aim is to document how the model of critical literacy is applied (or not) in these classrooms, and to explore the limitations and difficulties encountered, especially in the first grade of primary school where students need to move from emerging to developing literacy, i.e. they need to acquire the mechanisms of reading and writing. The methodology adopted follows the methods used in micro-ethnography, focusing in this case on participant observation of literacy classes and interviews with teachers in three classrooms.