Language Arts Classroom Research Articles

Without borders: youth debaters reimagining the nature and purpose of public dialogue

Purpose This paper aims to analyze how a group of middle-school debaters integrated their identities and epistemologies into the traditional literacy practice of debate to advocate for more expansive and inclusive forms of academic and civic discussion. The adult and youth co-researchers of the Debate Liberation League (DLL) detail their creation of a critical debate praxis through the use of spoken word and translanguaging and illustrate how they sought to redesign a foundational activity of English Language Arts on their own terms. Design/methodology/approach Drawing upon critical race and borderlands theories, the authors use critical ethnographic and participatory action research methods to explore how the DLL deconstructed the boundaries of what counts as public dialogue and offered an alternative model of what intergenerational and multi-voiced democratic discourse could look like in English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms and beyond. Findings The findings demonstrate how DLL students broke down normative binaries of affirmative/negative and objective/subjective in their debate performances and introduced testimonios as evidence for civic claims to make space for their voices and reimagine deliberation. Originality/value This study foregrounds dialogic data generation through a collaborative, intergenerational research approach. It highlights the constructed nature of literacy “rules,” demonstrates youth expertise in reimagining ELA, and offers a pathway toward a more compassionate public sphere.

Making Space: Complicating a Canonical Text Through Critical, Multimodal Work in a Secondary Language Arts Classroom

AbstractThe authors document research completed in 10th‐grade language arts classes where a canonical play was read alongside a graphic novel in the hopes of shifting student understandings of power and privilege in literature. Using teacher action research as a methodological framework for this qualitative study, a teacher and researcher engaged in long‐term fieldwork and participant observation as a means of investigating what happens when nontraditional texts are paired with canonical works in diverse secondary classrooms. Findings illustrate that by placing a work of the dominant literary study tradition in dialogue with a contemporary graphic novel, students accessed multiple perspectives that allowed for emotional, academic, and critical learning. Additionally, findings speak to the value of multimodal composing as a way to privilege student voice in conversations across various literary narratives and forms.

“Know Who They Have in Front of Their Eyes”: A Justice as Praxis Paradigm for Teaching and Learning

Inequitable access to learning opportunities has intersectional consequences for Black students in general and gifted education. Equally important, all students (regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic class, and grade-level), more often than not, lack invaluable opportunities to learn about the innumerable contributions of students and families of color in the United States and worldwide. To address these injustices, Ladson-Billings advocated for a shift from “justice as theory toward justice as praxis.” In this article, I unpack the components of justice as praxis work, and I discuss how I engaged in this work in my secondary English Language Arts (ELA) classroom. I address the following questions: What does it mean “to be seen” from the perspective of a Black male academically high-achieving student? What is needed for teachers to adopt a justice as praxis paradigm to improve their teaching and learning with students who have not been well served in public schools?

Reading Motivation in High School: Instructional Shifts in Student Choice and Class Time

AbstractResearch has shown that student choice of text and increased time spent on reading independently are two factors that can result in an increase in students’ reading motivation and enjoyment. The authors investigated implementation of evidence‐based practices to show how they played out in a high school English language arts classroom. The research was guided by two questions: (1) How does choice affect the reading motivation of a group of high school students? (2) How does silent reading time in class affect these students’ perceptions of reading? Findings reveal that students valued freedom of text choice, leading to increased reading self‐concepts and reading value. In addition, dedicating class time to reading and literature circle discussions helped students have more positive reading experiences than otherwise. These findings suggest benefits from flexibility in literature selection and instructional time, thereby providing a space in the classroom for student‐driven reading and discussion.

Glimmers of Care: Attending to the Affective Everyday in Ninth‐Grade Literacy Classrooms

AbstractIn this qualitative study, the authors examined how care was enacted, understood, and valued by teachers and students in nine ninth‐grade English language arts classrooms. Following two yearlong cohorts of teachers, the authors explored sociopolitical interpretations of care, specifically focusing on how care was an everyday, political phenomenon in the classrooms. Drawing on observations, teacher and student surveys and interviews, and students’ multimodal compositions and artifacts, the authors analyzed glimmers of affect within and across classrooms. The authors framed their findings around two vignettes to illustrate how clusters of analytic glimmers revealed three dimensions of political, everyday care in the classrooms. First, care was shaped by the structures of space and pedagogy in classrooms, such as the requirements imposed on student composition. Second, the manipulation of the actual space of classrooms—the positioning of desks and bodies—shaped care. Finally, the materiality and modality of student production in classrooms highlighted both the platforms on which students demonstrated forms of care and the authoring decisions they made. The authors conclude with specific suggestions for using glimmers as a methodological approach in other affective studies and for designing classrooms that provide avenues for students to shape the enactments of care in classrooms.

Writing Beyond “the Four Corners”: Adolescent Girls Writing By, In, From, and For Bodies in School

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.

A Contemporary Arts-Based Approach to Critical Multimodal Literacy

In this column, I share a framework for incorporating arts-based approaches to critical multimodal literacy in English language arts classrooms.

Measuring Production and Comprehension of Written Arguments in Upper-Elementary Grades

We describe a systematic process of developing measures of argument production and comprehension. These measures, designed for students in upper-elementary language arts classrooms, are called Writing Argument and Reading Argument. We discuss the rationale and theoretical framework for the measures, describe pilot and validation studies, and present initial findings to support the reliability, validity, and usability of these measures. Our results showed that both measures had acceptable inter-rater reliability. The correlations among Writing Argument, Reading Argument and an established reading comprehension test were moderate, which highlights the importance of task-specific competencies. The performance on both measures was not associated with ethnicity of the students. Gender was a significant predictor, with girls performing better than boys. Teachers found both measures to be pedagogically useful. Although some teachers initially struggled with learning how to use the scoring rubrics, they generally found the scoring for both tasks to be informative for their practice.

“That Sure is Racist”: Classroom Race Talk as Resistance

This work analyzed three grade 9 English Language Arts classroom discussions and contributions by Black youth as resistance acts. Using a framework of resistance based on an indigenous understanding of progress provided insight into how student resistance emerged in language as metaphor and stories. Thematic analysis of the three classroom discussions indicate student resistance is captured in the naming of what is often left silent or often silenced. Through transgressing evasion and silence, students’ counter stories and experiences shared in the classroom named social realities inscribed in their day-to-day experiences, as well as how schools are complicit in silencing the lives and history of Black and indigenous people. This work demonstrates the importance of situating resistance as counter narratives that work to reconfigure interpretations of personal and social identities situated more completely within embodied experiences.

Assemblaging communities

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the ways assemblaging communities work to support, hinder or disrupt literacy pedagogy in one English Language Arts (ELA) classroom. Through an expanded understanding of community based on the concept of assemblage, this paper discusses the ways in which one teacher’s critical literacies instructional practices emerged, configured and ruptured through the assemblaging communities’ that affected her enactment of critical literacies pedagogy. A focus on assemblaging communities recognizes the de/re/territorializing power of the evolving groups of bodies that produce a classroom and pedagogy in particular ways.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on observational field notes and informal exchanges, this qualitative study uses post-structural and post-human theory to examine the assemblaging communities that produced the enactment of critical literacies pedagogy in a seventh grade ELA classroom. Assemblage theory is used to analyze data to examine the assemblaging communities that de/re/territorialized in Ms T’s teaching in relation to critical literacies pedagogy. This analytical orientation allowed for a nuanced look at communities as evolving, de/re/territorializing formations that, in this study, created tensions for enacting critical literacies pedagogy.FindingsAssemblaging communities are always producing classrooms in particular ways, demonstrating the complexities and realities of enacting literacy pedagogy. Through analysis of the data, the rupture between the assemblaging communities that produced the enactment of critical literacies pedagogy and the assemblaging communities that produced test prep (and altered critical literacies) became apparent. Ruptures like this must be attended to because enacting critical literacies pedagogy is never done neutrally and without attention to the assemblaging communities that are always de/re/territorializing pedagogy, teachers may not be equipped to respond to the unexpected ruptures as well as material realities produced from these.Practical implicationsEducators can use the concept of assemblaging communities for recognizing the territories that shape their literacy pedagogy. By foregrounding assemblaging communities, researchers and educators may be more appropriately equipped to consider the real-time negotiations at play when enacting critical literacies pedagogy in the classroom. Enacting critical literacies pedagogy is never done neutrally, and attention to the assemblaging communities that are always de/re/territorializing pedagogy, teachers may be more equipped to respond to the material realities that are produced through their pedagogical actions.Originality/valueThis study suggests assemblaging communities as a way to productively move forward a perspective on communities that foregrounds the moving bodies that produce communities differently in evolving ways and their de/re/territorializing forces that create material realities for classrooMs Assemblaging communities moves the purpose from defining a community or interpreting what it means to looking at what it does, how it functions and for this study, how assemblaging communities produced critical literacies pedagogy in one classroom.

Dismantling anti-black linguistic racism in English language arts classrooms: Toward an anti-racist black language pedagogy

ABSTRACTIn this article, the author historicizes the argument about Black Language in the classroom to contextualize the contemporary linguistic inequities that Black students experience in English Language Arts (ELA) classroom. Next, the author describes anti-black linguistic racism and interrogates the notion of academic language. Following this, the author provides an ethnographic snapshot that shows how Black students in a ninth grade English Language Arts (ELA) class perceptions of Black Language reflected internalized anti-black linguistic racism. The author offers Anti-Racist Black Language Pedagogy as an approach that English Language Arts teachers can implement in an effort to dismantle anti-black linguistic racism and white cultural and linguistic hegemony in their classrooms using Angie Thomas’ (2017) novel The Hate U Give. The author concludes with thoughts about how an Anti-Racist Black Language pedagogy can help ELA students develop useful critical capacities.

Sound the alarm!: Disrupting sonic resonances of an elementary English language arts classroom

Classrooms are host to complex sonic ecologies informed by ritualized patterns and routines, but there remains a dearth of scholarship studying everyday sounds of schooling. Such research is important because it can amplify in new ways how children’s identities are constructed and thickened over time. This interpretive case study takes up the question as it interrogates sound’s capacity to inform children’s identities in a resource-limited, public elementary school in the Midwestern United States. Specifically, this inquiry explored in what ways sonic experiences might (re)produce and/or thicken (systemic) identities and positionings for children. Using critical positioning theories, the author details how sonic (re)occurrences informed children’s abilities to know, to be, and to be known in their classroom community. Through listening to the ambient experiences of everyday classrooms, the findings from this study showcase, new possibilities for exploring children’s identities and positionings. Through the storied experiences of two boys—acoustically described and analyzed—the author challenges critical early childhood researchers and educators to hear, perhaps for the first time, “unheard” everyday sounds like the alarm and consider the multiple ways such sounds resonate in classrooms.

Youths’ Choices to Read Optional Queer Texts in a High School ELA Classroom: Navigating Visibility through Literacy Sponsorship

Recent decades show increased scholarship in literacy education considering LGBTQ-themed texts and LGBTQ people in English language arts classrooms. Building on studies exploring choice in school-based reading, I focus on the experiences of youth navigating their visibility when they interacted with other people about their queer reading choices in the context of required independent reading for their ELA course. I examine how varying configurations of literacy sponsorship affected students’ actions. The findings help illuminate the complex relationships among LGBTQ-inclusive curricula and youth experiences.

Students at the Center: Insights and Implications of Authentic, 5E Instruction in High School English Language Arts

This paper explores the 5E model of lesson design (engage, explore, explain, extend, evaluate) in English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms in consideration of an authentic teaching and learning framework. This quasi-experimental pre and post intervention study centers on student motivation and academic emotions regarding direct instruction in comparison to an authentic, 5E lesson. When comparing pre and post conditions across two types of instructional methods (direct instruction and authentic, 5E lessons), findings suggest students are less interested and more bored when participating in direct instruction experiences. Moreover, academic pressure increased in the authentic group while classroom mastery decreased.

Why Now? More from the Authors of Restorative Justice in the English Language Arts Classroom

Why Now? More from the Authors of Restorative Justice in the English Language Arts Classroom

Authoring Selves in School: Adolescent Writing Identity

This embedded case study investigates the nature of authorship in a secondary English Language Arts classroom by examining two adolescents’ writing identities and experiences writing across genres. Using rhetorical genre theory, the study illustrates how composition and notions of authorship in this context were strongly informed by conversations—both with peers and the teacher. An additional finding was that students wrote themselves into different genre identities as they composed poetry, editorials, and memoirs, drawing on different authorial stances and sources of knowledge. Finally, this analysis documents robust learning about the nature of writing, including transferring rhetorical strategies across contexts and purposes, skills often called for in education policy as well as career and college writing, not documented in secondary schools. Implications for teaching include valuing relationship-building conversations, offering students multiple genre positions across secondary writing experiences, and considering ways to build upon writers’ self-described and socially constructed identities as successful writers.

Reconceptualizing “Home” and “School” Language: Taking a Critical Translingual Approach in the English Classroom

This article adds to the growing body of literature that calls for shifts in teachers’ and researchers’ stance and practice toward a re‐seeing and re‐hearing of students for their linguistic assets and expertise. By taking up the theory of translanguaging (García, 2009; García & Li Wei, 2014) to understand students’ language practices, I trouble the labels and terms so often assigned to language minoritized students, particularly those that fall into the larger categories of “home” and “school” language. To do this, I draw on data collected during a yearlong ethnographic study of an 11th‐grade English language arts classroom in New York City. This study took up what I term a critical translingual approach (Seltzer, 2019), engaging language minoritized students—bilingual students as well as those students traditionally viewed as monolingual—in metalinguistic conversations, literacy activities, and writing that delved into the role language played in their identities and lived experiences. By centering students’ talk and writing about their own languages, this article serves as a call to educators and researchers to relinquish conceptualizations of “standard” or “native” language and to embrace those that foster students’ critical integration of new features into their existing linguistic repertoires.

Positioning Spanish-Language and African American Language (AAL) Speakers as Knowledgeable and Valuable Contributors in the Language Arts Classroom

We utilize positioning theory to analyze language use within two different language program models in elementary language arts classrooms. We explore how the positioning of minoritized languages as valuable facilitates the use of students’ home languages in classrooms and allows us to examine the connections between language, identity, and power. Additionally, through the use of positioning theory alongside language learning theory, we recognize the importance of supporting students’ heritage language use, including nonstandard language varieties, in classroom settings. In the dual language (DL) classroom, we see how the teacher positions the Spanish language as valuable and worthy of learning. In the English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom, the teacher positions African American Language (AAL) as worthy of study and inclusion in the curriculum and promotes the use of AAL within the poetry unit. Finally, we identify tensions that can emerge for teachers in different sociopolitical contexts within each of these language learning models.

Accommodating linguistic prejudice? Examining English teachers’ language ideologies

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to support the integration of scientifically grounded linguistic knowledge into language teaching in English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms through building an understanding of what teachers currently know and believe about language.Design/methodology/approachIn total, 310 high school English teachers in the USA responded to a survey about their language beliefs. Statistical analysis of responses identified four distinct constructs within their belief systems. Sub-scales were created for each construct, and hierarchical regressions helped identify key characteristics that predicted beliefs along a continuum from traditional/hegemonic to linguistically informed/counter-hegemonic.FindingsKey findings include the identification of four belief constructs: beliefs about how language reveals speaker characteristics, beliefs about how society perceives language use, beliefs about how language should be treated in schools and beliefs about the English teacher’s role in addressing language use. In general, teachers expressed counter-hegemonic beliefs for their own role and their view of speaker characteristics. They expressed hegemonic beliefs for societal perceptions and the dominant school language narrative. Taking a linguistics class was associated with counter-hegemonic beliefs, and teaching longer was associated with more hegemonic beliefs.Practical implicationsThe findings of this study suggest that the longer teachers teach within a system that promotes hegemonic language practices, the more they will align their own beliefs with those practices, despite having learned linguistic facts that contradict pervasive societal beliefs about language. The Dominant School Language Narrative currently accommodates, rather that disrupting, linguistic prejudice.Originality/valueA current understanding of teachers’ language ideologies is a key step in designing teacher professional development to help align teaching practices with established linguistic knowledge and to break down a socially constructed linguistic hierarchy based on subjective, and frequently prejudicial, beliefs.

Designing Translingual Pedagogies: Exploring Pedagogical Translation through a Classroom Teaching Experiment

This study examined how middle-grades language arts teachers learned to integrate a small-group collaborative translation activity into their teaching practice. We discuss what we call pedagogical translation as an emergent social practice, in which translation routines that are familiar to multilingual students may be leveraged toward instructional goals in a mainstream language arts class. The data were drawn from a classroom teaching experiment iteration of a larger design-based research study, whose goal is to create a fully developed instructional protocol useful to all teachers in linguistically diverse language arts classrooms, but especially teachers with limited or emerging proficiencies in languages other than English. We position pedagogical translation as a paradigm case of translingual pedagogy—instructional approaches designed to leverage the full range of emerging bilinguals’ linguistic resources—and we focus our analysis on the agentive participation of teachers as they integrate new translingual routines into their instructional practice. Using a conjecture mapping procedure, we describe the evolution of an instructional theory for how pedagogical translation can be leveraged toward literacy learning objectives. We present qualitative narratives describing how participating teachers made locally situated design choices that meshed new routines with existing instructional practice, documenting trajectories of teacher participation as agentive designers of translingual pedagogy.