Language Arts Classroom Research Articles

Reading the world in Spanglish: Hybrid language practices and ideological contestation in a sixth-grade English language arts classroom

This paper presents findings from a study of language and ideology among bilingual Chicana/o and Latina/o sixth-graders at a middle school in East Los Angeles. Relying on participant observation, video/audio-recording, and semi-structured interviews, the study explored students’ language ideologies with respect to Spanish-English code-switching, a language practice that many of the students referred to as “Spanglish.” Analysis of the data reveals that students articulated and embodied both dominant language ideologies that framed Spanglish in pejorative terms and counter-hegemonic language ideologies that valorized and normalized this bilingual language practice. It is argued that this ideological variation and contradiction provide fertile ground for transformative dialog that could potentially help students cultivate critical language awareness and critical literacy more broadly.

DECAL: A Strategy for Collaborative Literature Discussions

This article addresses a small group literature discussion technique that was implemented during one pre-service teacher’s field experience in a seventh grade Language Arts classroom. Based on the principles of social constructivism and transactional theory of reader response, the DECAL model is structured to allow students to better understand the complexity of literary elements and to stimulate lively discussions. DECAL stands for Design, Extensions, Connections, Author’s Structure, and Language. It is a variation of collaborative literacy in which group processes are a part of the individual learning activity. DECAL provides teachers with the steps to promote active engagement and empower students to build their own knowledge within the constructed democracy of learning. The small group literature discussion technique presented in this article is applicable to teacher educators who wish to address the important role of collaborative book discussion for young adolescent readers in middle grade pre-serviceteacher education.

Improving Classroom Quality with The RULER Approach to Social and Emotional Learning: Proximal and Distal Outcomes

The RULER Approach to Social and Emotional Learning ("RULER") is designed to improve the quality of classroom interactions through professional development and classroom curricula that infuse emotional literacy instruction into teaching-learning interactions. Its theory of change specifies that RULER first shifts the emotional qualities of classrooms, which are then followed, over time, by improvements in classroom organization and instructional support. A 2-year, cluster randomized controlled trial was conducted to test hypotheses derived from this theory. Sixty-two urban schools either integrated RULER into fifth- and sixth-grade English language arts (ELA) classrooms or served as comparison schools, using their standard ELA curriculum only. Results from multilevel modeling with baseline adjustments and structural equation modeling support RULER's theory of change. Compared to classrooms in comparison schools, classrooms in RULER schools exhibited greater emotional support, better classroom organization, and more instructional support at the end of the second year of program delivery. Improvements in classroom organization and instructional support at the end of Year 2 were partially explained by RULER's impacts on classroom emotional support at the end of Year 1. These findings highlight the important contribution of emotional literacy training and development in creating engaging, empowering, and productive learning environments.

Conversation Currents: Interrupting the Single Story: LGBT Issues in the Language Arts Classroom

Two literacy leaders acknowledge the challenges of teaching LGBT issues in the classroom. While children come from a variety of family structures, it is necessary to acknowledge that a gay individual was once a child sitting in a classroom. An argument against marginalization and an advocacy for inclusion of all learners is discussed.

Naturally-Occurring Comprehension Strategies Instruction in 9th-Grade Language Arts Classrooms

In this descriptive classroom study, we used video-based observations supplemented with teacher interviews to provide precise information about the instruction of comprehension strategies that naturally occurred in 4 Norwegian lower-secondary language arts classrooms while students worked with expository texts. The results showed that the teachers varied vastly with respect to the amount of comprehension strategies instruction, that the repertoire of strategies that was taught was quite narrow, that the instruction was mainly implicit and carried out with the whole class, and that the teachers lacked professional knowledge about reading comprehension and reading comprehension instruction. We discuss our methodology and findings in relation to previous descriptive work on comprehension strategies instruction.

Temporality and Textual Engagement in a Middle School English Language Arts Classroom

Using Gadamer's concept of tarrying, this paper explores the impact of classroom temporality on students' engagement with text in an 8th grade English Language Arts classroom. Through an analysis of interactional data collected during two years of an ethnographic study of classroom activities, I show how reading strategies helped constitute and were constituted by a linear, dimensional temporality, within which text and reader were individuated and textual meaning objectified, characterized by an “ontology of static substance” (Ross 2006). In such cases, the act of reading was defined as a processual movement through or consumption of text, which could break down requiring strategies to restore the smooth flow. At other moments, however, interaction around text took on a tarrying temporality. These less frequent moments resonate with Gadamer's claims for the state of understanding associated with the experience of art, a “being moved” (2001:76), an “uninterrupted pure gazing” (2006:72) associated with the “absolute presentness” of art (2006:60). In classroom moments I call tarrying, students were more often engaged in an open‐ended, exploratory co‐construction of meaning with other participants, rather than producing items at someone else's request. Text was not possessed but, on the contrary, became something that took hold of participants and was jointly occupied or shared. Within such moments, reading strategies, usually decontextualized tools to be applied by an individual subject to a text, receded instead into the tarrying or “playing”—a “movement backwards and forwards” (Gadamer 1975:93)—of the immediate interactional context.

Improving the Social and Emotional Climate of Classrooms: A Clustered Randomized Controlled Trial Testing the RULER Approach

The RULER Approach ("RULER") is a setting-level, social and emotional learning program that is grounded in theory and evidence. RULER is designed to modify the quality of classroom social interactions so that the climate becomes more supportive, empowering, and engaging. This is accomplished by integrating skill-building lessons and tools so that teachers and students develop their emotional literacy. In a clustered randomized control trial, we tested the hypothesis that RULER improves the social and emotional climate of classrooms. Depending upon condition assignment, 62 schools either integrated RULER into fifth- and sixth-grade English language arts (ELA) classrooms or served as comparison schools, using their standard ELA curriculum only. Multi-level modeling analyses showed that compared to classrooms in comparison schools, classrooms in RULER schools were rated as having higher degrees of warmth and connectedness between teachers and students, more autonomy and leadership among students, and teachers who focused more on students' interests and motivations. These findings suggest that RULER enhances classrooms in ways that can promote positive youth development.

How Do I Earn Buy-In from Digital Natives?

Many teachers find it difficult to encourage their students to write in class, yet writing is becoming increasingly important in academic and workplace settings. Students are already writing through cell phone texting, gaming systems, and social networking sites every day, but these resources go largely untapped in many English language arts classrooms. We found several ways to motivate our students to write using technology they already use and enjoy. Students loved to create character bookmarks, character Facebook or MySpace pages, and guides for video games. Incorporating technology students already want to use, we created projects based on literature we were reading in our classes. In the end, technology became the enticement that created a gateway to deeper reading and better writing. The students then produced exemplary papers and projects with genuine text-to-self and text-to-world connections. Motivating your students to write is easier and the experience fuller when you include technology.

Permeable Textual Discussion in Tracked Language Arts Classrooms

Permeable textual discussion occurs when the unofficial texts and discursive practices and personal histories that are already recognized and valued in students’ cultures are scaffolds to academically sanctioned literacies. Ideally, permeable textual discussions are safe havens where students’ identities (racial, gender, world views) are intentionally interwoven with classroom texts, and classroom communities are formed that responsively address matters of student identity. Yet the social contexts and instructional practices of academic tracking may shape how students reveal their identities during textual talk. This project examines the conditions of permeability during textual talk in tracked classrooms taught by the same teachers using the same texts. Using ethnographic methods and discourse analysis, the author examines how two tracked urban middle school language arts students of African American heritage revealed and hid their identities during textual talk and the instructional moves that precipitated textual talk.

Re-Visioning "Right" Writing in the Language Arts Classroom

Re-Visioning "Right" Writing in the Language Arts Classroom

Hope is the thing with metaphors: de-situating literacies and learning in English Language Arts classrooms

In this article, we examine the relationship between classroom talk, teacher–student roles and paradigms for literacy and learning in two ninth-grade English Language Arts classes. Our goal was to understand how these roles and practices socialized students into norms for academic language and literacy as they read and wrote poetry in preparation for a high-stakes standardized essay. Drawing from social and critical approaches to literacy, we describe how a policy-driven narrowing of the curriculum also narrowed conceptions of literacy and knowledge. Differences in the treatment of students’ poems versus the Dickinson poem positioned students as unable to co-construct knowledge. The high-stakes essay, not yet assigned, drove almost all discourse about text, meaning and legitimate knowledge, essentially ‘de-situating’ literacy from the tasks and immediate context and prioritizing technical skills over communicative purposes. Implications for research, teaching and students’ development of academic language and literacy address the tension between meaningful literacy instruction and accountability demands of contemporary classrooms.

Seeing the Value: Why the Visual Arts Have a Place in the English Language Arts Classroom

Seeing the Value: Why the Visual Arts Have a Place in the English Language Arts Classroom

Guiding the Noticing: Using a Dramatic Performance Experience to Promote Tellability in Narrative Writing

In this article, the author describes her use of dramatic performance to promote tellability in narrative writing within a seventh and eighth grade English and language arts classroom. By experiencing dramatic performance, the students were able to actively and physically perform the writing process: brainstorming, drafting, revising, and editing. Furthermore, the students promoted classroom community and collaboration. This article expounds how classroom teachers could facilitate these dramatic performances so that their students would make visible their decisions as writers. Infusing dramatic performance throughout the writing process advanced both the quality and the positive attitudes about writing.

Reading Moby-Dick in a Participatory Culture: Organizing Assessment for Engagement in a new Media Era

Traditional literacy instruction is perhaps still necessary but is certainly no longer sufficient to prepare learners for participation in the range of literacy practices that characterize an increasingly participatory culture. This article identifies discrepancies between traditional instructional practices that emphasize individual mastery of abstract concepts and skills and new media literacy practices that rely upon collaborative, social, and context-specific activity. In particular, mainstream assessment practices become problematic for teachers who are interested in integrating these so-called “participatory practices” into their classrooms. Through a description of a year-long collaboration around a secondary language arts curriculum, we present an assessment framework designed to support a social model of learning and to help prepare learners for engagement with and participation in a range of knowledge-building and problem-solving activities and communities, while supporting gains in more traditional curricular and standards-based assessments. This framework, which we call “participatory assessment,” builds on previous work in science and math instruction, as well as in immersive video games, and extends that work into the secondary English language arts classroom. This article describes the curriculum, the approach, and some of the assessment design principles that emerged.

Spotting Foolbirds

Many of the literacies students possess go unnoticed or untapped in schools. In some cases, these hidden literacies are not seen or valued because they are not viewed as appropriate or relevant in relation to officially sanctioned, school-based literacies. The literature has shown that these hidden literacies are indeed valuable and relevant and need to be recognized and utilized, yet they continue to hide out in classrooms. Drawing on the body of work on hidden literacies and the metaphor of camouflage, this case study details hidden literacy practices during classroom literacy events in an English language arts classroom. Vignettes are presented featuring three different focal students actively hiding literacies through three different means—covering up, lying low, and blending in. This article suggests that looking for and focusing on instances of hiding in plain sight during literacy events can expose telling juxtapositions between students’ full repertoire of literacy practices, in the foreground, and the “appropriate” or normative literacy practices of schools, or backgrounds, against which they disappear.

Transmediation in the Language Arts Classroom: Creating Contexts for Analysis and Ambiguity

When a language arts curriculum provided students with the opportunity to translate meaning across sign systems (that is, from poetry to dance), numerous benefits were noted. Transmediation, the translation of meaning from one sign system to another, led students to analyze compositional structures and to enhance their use of academic language across disciplines. Excerpts of teacher and student conversation around multiple artistic modalities and discussion of student written work are included in the findings presented.

Does naturally occurring comprehension strategies instruction make a difference when students read expository text?

The present study examined whether observed differences in naturally occurring classroom instruction of reading comprehension strategies were reflected in students' independent use of strategies to comprehend expository text. Based on a descriptive classroom study in 4 ninth‐grade language arts classrooms, participants were divided into two groups depending on the amount of comprehension strategies instruction that had been observed in their classrooms. When working independently on an experimental reading task, students in the high strategies instruction group (n=58) performed better and seemed to make effective use of deeper‐level strategies, whereas students in the low strategies instruction group (n=46) seemed to rely more on surface‐level memorisation strategies. This study is unique in following up descriptive classroom data on comprehension strategies instruction with data from an experimental reading task, suggesting that not only carefully crafted comprehension strategies interventions but also naturally occurring comprehension strategies instruction may make a difference when students strive to comprehend expository text.

A Social Justice Approach as a Base for Teaching Writing

In the English language arts classroom, social justice is a way to increase students' abilities to articulate their experiences, critique their world, and address those identified issues with subsequent action. Teachers who practice social justice education cultivate student voice through class activities, readings, assignments, and assessments that allow students to incorporate their personal stories within the contexts of the school curriculum. By teaching students to use genre, voice, research support, and various writing conventions for social justice, teachers help students learn to express themselves as individuals, community members, and global citizens.

Principles and Practices for Building Academic Self-Efficacy in Middle Grades Language Arts Classrooms

Academic self-efficacy contributes to students' motivation and persistence for learning. However, motivation for reading and learning, and students' self-efficacy in school often declines in adolescence. This manuscript presents research-based strategies for facilitating students' motivations within the context of language arts classes.

Growing Literate Beings

This is an introduction to a high school student’s perspective on what the ideal language arts classroom should look like. It is based on a middle school language arts classroom structured around a Nancie Atwell style workshop model. The workshop model in the classroom was grounded in real life literacy experiences, allowed for choice in writing and reading, included daily shared reading experiences, fostered discussion about texts, and included open communication between teacher and students. However the language taken from Atwell’s In the Middle is the true foundation of the workshop.