Literacy Practices Research Articles

THE ENGLISH LITERACY PRACTICE, WORLD KNOWLEDGE PROFICIENCY, AND TEXT SKIMMING OF TENTH GRADES

Literacy is vital in understanding pupils' knowledge of learning content. However, learners have encountered several learning challenges, including vocabulary mastering and reading comprehension. The purpose of this study was to see if there was a link between students' literacy practice, world knowledge proficiency, and text skimming in senior high school. This study's data was analyzed using quantitative methodologies and a correlation design. There were 141 tenth grade students from SMAN 4 Kota Kediri who took part. They completed the vocabulary and reading comprehension tests by multiple-choice questions and items for the reading habits questionnaire. The researcher utilized Pearson Product Moment Coefficient and using SPSS ver 26.0 for Windows to assess the correlation. Following data analysis, it was discovered that all variables have a significant (sig.) value of 0.00. while coefficient The correlation between reading literacy and vocabulary mastery was 0.504, whereas the correlation between reading literacy and text skimming was 0.257 and the correlation between vocabulary mastery and text skimming was 0.441. Based on the above results, there was a substantial connection between all variables, therefore Ho is rejected but Ha should be approved. When pupils have a high degree of reading literacy, it can be argued that they have a greater skill in vocabulary mastery and text skimming. The higher the degree of students' reading literacy and vocabulary knowledge, the better the students' reading comprehension ability.

Exploring views on praxis possibilities of multilingualism in university literacy pedagogies

Background: South African literacy-as-social-practice theoreticians, language-in-education experts, educational linguists, and language policies advocate multilingual pedagogies to acknowledge and cater to diverse multilingual learners’ literacy development. Universities purport multilingualism to provide for the multilingual norm, students’ literacy, and educational development, as scholarship shows that multilingualism benefits academia and literacy education. Yet, these universities remain locations for monolingual and epistemological biases. Concerns about such praxis pretensions in pluralistic literacy education and the failures in literacy-as-social-practice strategies have been raised. However, the perceptions of lecturers and students on their role in implementing desirable praxis in multilingual literacy education are under-researched.Objectives: This qualitative study explores lecturers’ and students’ perceptions and their impact on practising linguistic plurality in literacy for educational development schemes.Method: The research uses in-depth individual and focus-group interviews with four lecturers and four first-year undergraduate students at a selected linguistically diverse university. An interpretivist paradigm was applied consisting of participants’ subjective experiences as members of a higher education institution (HEI).Results: Findings reveal that lecturers have difficulty coping with multiple languages due to inadequate training and misconceptions about multilingualism, and monolingual pedagogy perceptions carried over from their institutions whose culture denies students’ linguistic plurality.Conclusion: The study demonstrates the importance of shifts in epistemological orientation and adequate training, focused on multilingualism, to develop versatile and agile lecturers equipped for multilingual universities.Contribution: This research contributes to understanding the complex implementation problems regarding multilingual literacy education and possible solutions. It postulates new ways of forging multilingual literacy practices to erase praxis morbidity.

Using Price Promotions to Drive Children's Healthy Choices in a Developing Economy

This research examines how price discounts—a classic marketing incentive—drive children's healthy choices in the understudied context of a developing economy. The authors partnered with UNICEF to launch three field experiments in Panamá among 2,418 children to examine four pillars of price discount promotions for children: what to discount (product selection), how to discount (message design), whom to target (children's age), and whether to discount again (repetition). They uncovered four previously undocumented insights. First, price discounts alone effectively increase demand among children 6–11 years of age, reconciling conflicting findings in prior literature. Second, product selection based on relative price—a particularly crucial factor in developing regions—drives opposing postpromotion effects: ironically, marketers should not discount expensive healthy options but rather moderately priced ones. Third, different from prior literature's practice of directly communicating final prices, discount messages that require older children to derive final prices are more effective. Fourth, repetition can amplify or undermine discounts’ efficacy depending on message complexity and children's age. This research offers concrete guidelines for researchers and practitioners, uncovering both positive and negative effects of price promotions on children, and shedding light on price promotion interventions that most powerfully nudge children of different ages to act.

Initial Assessment of First Language Literacy Resources for Adult Instruction in Swedish

This study is part of a project on initial assessment of first language (L1) literacy in adult newcomers prior to the commencement of L2 studies in Swedish. Here, we explore the assessment summaries of newcomers’ L1 literacy, performed by L2-teachers, with assistance from an interpreter. According to the syllabus, instruction in Swedish for Immigrants (SFI) should be adapted to the individual´s needs and goals; however, SFI often fails to do so. L1 literacy—i.e., using texts in different domains (school, work, society, and everyday life)—serves as a foundation for L2 learning and teachers’ access to and utilization of students L1 literacy can significantly enhance instruction. From a sociocultural approach to literacy and based on Luke and Freebody’s ‘Four Resource Model’, a qualitative document analyses of L1 literacy assessment summaries (N = 50) demonstrated literacy practices form different domains of student life, beyond school literacy. Literacy practices from all four learner roles, i.e., Code-Breaker, Text Participant, Text User and Text Analyst were identified in the assessments to various degrees dependent on the students’ background, which is illustrated by a close analysis of 5 summaries. This information is both important for teachers’ planning of second language teaching and in the long term for the development of second language teacher education.

Links between booksharing and early vocabulary development in Costa Rica

Early vocabulary development is crucial for future cognitive and academic outcomes, and parent-child booksharing has been recognized as a powerful home literacy practice to promote word learning. However, evidence about the link between booksharing and language development in diverse cultural and socioeconomic settings is currently limited, hindering the formulation of a broadly applicable framework to understand the favorable conditions for early vocabulary development. This study explores the relationship between booksharing and early receptive and expressive vocabulary in a sample of 183 mothers and their toddlers in Costa Rica, a context where reading is not a common practice and children have limited access to books. Mothers completed an interview about their booksharing practices and reported children’s receptive and expressive vocabulary. Results demonstrated a positive link between maternal booksharing and children’s expressive vocabulary. Child gender moderated the link between booksharing and receptive vocabulary, exhibiting a stronger association in girls than in boys. Mothers with lower education levels reported higher expressive vocabulary scores for their children than mothers with higher education levels. These findings underscore the significance of booksharing in the home literacy environment, even in cultural contexts with distinct reading practices. Moreover, they highlight the need to incorporate sociocultural factors into comprehensive accounts concerning the role of booksharing in early word learning.

Towards kinship literacies: attending to place relations in a play-based library program

ABSTRACT Kinship relationality understands the world as alive and sentient, and positions humans as participants within interconnected ecological networks. Inherently, this worldview can challenge how many educators and learners have been trained in extractive, transactional, and sedentary cultures; that is, separated out of relationship. This article shares the work of a large urban public library in western Canada, and their ‘Play Professor,’ as they built and facilitated an outdoor play-based literacy program. Following the program, amid subtle and stark reminders of ecological disaster, we noted the possibilities and complexities when moving literacy learning outdoors. Guided by kinship relationality [Donald. 2021. “We Need a New Story: Walking and the wâhkôhtowin Imagination.” Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 18 (2): 53–63. https://doi.org/10.25071/1916-4467.40492], this article centres how conceptions of literacies might be expanded and nuanced to engage languages and stories already alive within the place-based ecologies where the learning occurs. Sharing vignettes of how the program unfolded, we sketch shifts in facilitation as other life forms came into the storied play. To support relational renewal in and through literacy practices we then bring forward the notion of kinship literacies and articulate three catalysts to support its growth: attuning to ecological stories, enhancing holistic practices, and expanding dialogue.

ALFABETIZAÇÃO E LETRAMENTO: REPRESENTAÇÕES DE PROFESSORAS DO SEMIÁRIDO BAIANO PÓS-PNAIC

In the last decade, that is, between 2012 and 2022, literacy teachers in the Semiarid Zone of the State of Bahia joined the Program Literacy at the Right Age (PNAIC in Portuguese), in which the theoretical foundations of alphabetization and literacy practice have been accessed. hroughout this period, little is known about the images that remained of these foundations in teachers' narratives about their classroom practices. This study, therefore, based on the studies of intertextuality referenced by textually oriented discourse analysis (ADTO) (FAIRCLOUGH, 2001) and based on the theory of social representations (JODELET, 2001; ABRIC, 2016) aims to describe the new discursive anchors and the transformations of the concepts of alphabetization and literacy in the narratives of a group of literacy teachers trained by the PNAIC program. From these analyzes, changes in positions and knowledge will be revealed, in addition to highlighting the relevance of this type of study for the monitoring of future continuing education projects in Brazil.

Teachers’ perceptions of implementing digital multimodal composing in tertiary classrooms: Voices from Chinese EFL teachers

AbstractIn language education, digital multimodal composing (DMC) pertains to a new literacy practice in which students use digital tools to produce texts incorporating multiple semiotic modes. Despite that many scholars advocate for implementing DMC in language classrooms, it remains marginal in mainstream classrooms, with scant attention being paid to teachers’ perceptions concerning the use of DMC. Situated in Chinese universities, this research probes into the perspectives of five English teachers on implementing DMC as a pedagogical innovation. The analysis of data collected from multiple sources reveals that the teachers perceived DMC positively due to its affordances for students, namely, cultivating digital and multimodal literacies, improving speaking and writing abilities, fostering collaboration and communication skills, and enhancing learning interest and motivation. Teachers themselves harvested benefits regarding deeper insights into students’ learning potentials, enhanced digital literacies, a novel avenue for academic research, and an innovative teaching method. Nonetheless, the teachers expressed concerns about time constraints, students’ engagement in group work, potential plagiarism, assessment of students’ videos, and the long‐term effect of DMC on students’ writing performance. Based on the findings, this research provides implications for integrating curriculum innovations like DMC into conventional curricula.

Investigation of flue gas temperature effects in natural gas fueled Systems: Experimental thermal performance and structural optimization

This paper presents an innovative approach by employing experimental and analytical methods to examine the impact of temperature changes in flue gases following combustion on design.Thermal performance experiments conducted on chimney samples have shown that a 2 mm axial expansion, resulting from thermal expansion, affects support designs. To analyze the impact of this often-neglected elongation in support designs and the axial movements caused by temperature, tensile tests were applied to five double-riveted samples with a diameter of 4.8. Subsequently, finite element analyses were conducted on the same model. The ratio between the stress results of the tensile tests and the finite element analysis was found to be 1.04, consistent with the literature. Following the validation of the tensile test, an analytical approach was developed by incorporating forces neglected due to expansion. This approach was complemented by an optimization study to improve the placement of rivets on the plate, for which a code was written. When run on a sample model, the code determined that the coordinates of the six rivets should be (119,50), (97,88), (53,88), (31,50), (53,12), and (97,12), respectively, within the constraints. Additionally, the code was executed with different optimization techniques to compare the results for composite force, number of rivets, circular radius, and coordinates.Furthermore, to observe the effect of temperature on chimney draft, calculations were made for different diameters like Ø 200, Ø 225, and Ø 250. It was observed that as the temperature increased towards 450 °C, there was an increase in pressure difference up to the saturation point.The findings may contribute to the existing literature for researchers and practitioners in this field. Additionally, the presented code offers the capability to quickly calculate the distribution of any fasteners on the plate according to the given data, without the need for a tensile test, finite element analysis, or any other numerical calculation method.

Young children with intellectual disabilities and their mathematical attainments: Do parents' attitudes toward mathematics, home numeracy, and literacy practices matter?

This study explored potential factors of numeracy acquisition in young children with intellectual disabilities (IDs). Those factors are determined to assess parents' academic expectations and home practices that they use with their children daily. The sample consisted of 187 Greek-speaking couples, comprising a total number of 374 parents. All of them had a child with mild IDs aged between 4 and 7 years old. Since Greece is placed among European countries with the lowest median disposable income it is significant to assess the potential effects of each family's socioeconomic status. We employed structural equation modeling to identify potential factors affecting a child's with IDs numeracy outcomes. Analysis of moments structures (AMOS) revealed that there is a good fit for the suggested second-order structural equation model. Results are discussed regarding their practical implications.

Financial Literacy Practices on the Investment Decisions of Accounting Professionals in Makati City

Financial literacy provides individuals with the means to assess the potential risks linked with various investment options enabling investors to make educated decisions. Therefore, the objective of this research is to identify the financial literacy practices adopted by accounting professionals and determine the level of influence of these financial literacy practices on the investment decisions of the respondents. This research applied a quantitative research methodology with convenient selection of participants. The respondents consisted of Eighty (80) accounting professionals of selected firms in Makati City. A self-made survey questionnaire was utilized in gathering data on the demographics of respondents and the degree to which financial literacy practices influenced their investment decisions. Thus, the data collected from the survey questionnaire underwent analysis and interpretation utilizing interval data measurement on a Four-point Likert scale. The findings of this research highlighted that there exist a statistically significant correlation between budgeting (r=0.924, p=0.001), saving and investing (r=0.970, p<0.001), and debt management (r=0.919, p=0.001) on investment decisions of accounting professionals. Notably, saving and investing as financial literacy practices can be positively associated with investment decisions. When budgeting, it is crucial to assess whether significant purchases align with your needs and fit within your financial capabilities. Thus, the fact that the respondents tend to prioritize avoiding new debts emphasizes how important it is to manage debts responsibly when making investment decisions.

Looking for It: Language, Literacy, and History in Place

Within this article, we explore how teachers, researchers, and community members—including youth—worked in collaborative conversations and place-based projects to explore the languages, stories, and histories of their local Georgia communities. By examining the process of “looking for it,” as one youth researcher puts it, this article explores three inquiry practices Georgia youth use to identify and sustain community language and literacy practices: personal storytelling, walking histories, and breaking bread. These community literacies resulted in youth having a stronger sense of self and community and understanding the relationship between them. Additionally, the practices spurred critical thinking, historical inquiry, and socioemotional learning. Community exploration through community literacies created the foundation for place-based language, literacy, and history research to take root and flourish.

Shame and love in a city high school: Understanding Chinese rural students' narratives of critical world making

AbstractIn this Narrative Inquiry, we share the stories of three Chinese rural students who grew up in a southeastern county in China before moving to the county seat for high school. By inviting our participants to read their own life, we aimed to understand how Chinese rural students make sense of their experience in an exam‐centered school system that seemed to offer them opportunities of upward social mobility but at the same time perpetuated the mindset of rural deficiency. Data analysis shows that the visceral feelings of shame and love played an important role in our participants' critical consciousness about school, allowing them to work within and against school norms to transform a strictly stratified school space. We argue that marginalized youth's storytelling can become a practice of critical literacy, enabling them to construct critical meaning makings in embodied ways.

Integrating Conventional and Innovative Practices: Enhancing Literacy Education in Diverse Contexts

The Spring 2024 issue of the Georgia Journal of Literacy highlights how traditional teaching methods and innovative practices can be merged to effectively address the needs of today’s diverse student population. Articles within this issue advocate for a dynamic approach to literacy instruction, combining decades of research with contemporary classroom realities. The contributors to this issue explore topics from the complexities of reading aloud to leveraging community-based literacy projects, each underscoring strategies to create more inclusive and engaging learning environments. The issue also examines the importance of empirical data in developing effective literacy practices and offers practical strategies that apply research findings to enhance teaching and learning. The nine articles in this issue deepen understanding and encourage educators to innovate and adapt in ways that improve student engagement and literacy outcomes.

Unraveling the complexity: A taxonomy for characterizing and structuring smart energy services in the building sector

Achieving climate goals requires restructuring the current energy systems, which, among other things, involves decentralizing energy systems. This entails new challenges, e.g., a high degree of coordination and information exchange. Especially the building sector, being the largest energy consumer, offers great improvement potential to reduce emissions. Smart energy services promise various benefits in overcoming these challenges, e.g., through optimized energy generation, demand control, and more efficient energy control systems. Although smart energy services are crucial to transitioning to a more sustainable, reliable, and intelligent energy (eco)system, research lacks a holistic perspective of their essential characteristics and configuration options due to their novelty and heterogeneity. Nevertheless, this perspective is crucial as service providers, service innovators (e.g., business development and start-ups), and researchers face problems developing and deploying value-adding and sustaining smart energy services. Consequently, this work identifies the essential characteristics of building-related smart energy services by reviewing scientific and practitioner literature. It structures them by developing a taxonomy and organizing them in 15 dimensions and 54 characteristics, along smart energy service structure, value creation, delivery, and energy-related data input. The taxonomy and the derived theoretical and managerial implications support researchers and practitioners in designing and conceptualizing future smart energy service innovations.

CLIL teacher online professional development in translanguaging and trans-semiotizing: a pedagogy of multiliteracies

ABSTRACT Theories of translanguaging and trans-semiotizing have gained relevance in the design of learning in CLIL classrooms. However, while many studies have shown the benefits of these pedagogies, scarce research has explored CLIL teacher professional development (PD) in this field. In this paper, I intend to measure the effectiveness of an online pedagogy of multiliteracies, which embraces translanguaging and trans-semiotizing, to enhance CLIL teachers’ semiotic awareness to design learning experiences that improve students’ comprehension. The study was conducted on a multicultural group of 200 CLIL teachers from Spain, Colombia and Ecuador. They worked with primary and secondary students in multilingual contexts where a Spanish dialect, or a co-official, an indigenous or a Creole language was the L1, and English the L2. The data were collected from two sources, an initial survey and a final essay. The content analysis of the dataset revealed that the learning intervention positively influenced teachers’ pre-existing beliefs and PD. They showed a more accurate conceptualisation of translanguaging and trans-semiotizing, were more aware of their multimodal literacy practices to make new content comprehensible in CLIL classrooms, and identified potential improvements in their communication processes related to the two concepts.

Fostering empathy through critical literacy in early childhood education in Colombia

ABSTRACT In Colombia, some educational settings, particularly territories with high levels of educational inequality, uphold conventional teaching strategies where emotional education and critical thinking receive little attention. This study is rooted in our intention to contribute to peace education in early childhood educational environments by fostering critical thinking and empathy, a predictor of prosocial behavior in children. The aim of this study is, first, that young children develop empathy by recognizing situations of oppression and injustice in children’s literature using critical literacy practices; and second, to contribute to young children’s development of critical thinking. Utilizing Critical Discourse Analysis, we suggest that critical literacy practices enhance empathy and critical thinking in young children through three strategies: reading selected children’s literature aloud, responding through multimodal texts, and having an open dialogue about critical issues that affect children in local communities. This article contributes to the literature about literacy, empathy development, and peace education with young children.

Bentham, Iser, and the Necessity of Fiction

Despite the intense reception and critical discussion which Wolfgang Iser’s work on the reading process and the esthetics of reception (Rezeptionsästhetik) received throughout the 1970s and 80s in Anglo-American literary criticism, his later ambitious attempt to sketch out a “literary anthropology” with the help of a general theory of fiction was almost completely ignored outside of his immediate German context. This is especially lamentable from the perspective of law and literature approaches to legal and literary fiction since Iser’s argument for the anthropological “grounding” of fictions as acts of motivated and strategic “feigning” (fingieren) develops out of a careful analysis and assessment of Jeremy Bentham’s Theory of Fiction. Iser’s discussion of Bentham does not only present a rare case of acknowledgement of Benthamian notions about fictions from the perspective of continental literary theory, it also illustrates the way in which the discussion of fiction in general may serve to foster a more robust interdisciplinary perspective in regard to legal and literary practices of storytelling and narration. 1 Since Iser’s theory of (literary) fiction has been perceived from rather different angles and with a diverging range of comprehension by Anglo-American and European audiences, respectively, the essay will first attempt to introduce and place Iser’s discussion of fiction and the imaginary within the larger disciplinary context and his overarching interest and investment in a literary anthropology. After a more general presentation of the various elements in his larger work, the paper will briefly look at the “anthropological” prospects which Iser had pursued from early on throughout his critical work, culminating in The Fictive and the Imaginary. The second half of the essay will then take a closer look at Iser’s particular interest in and detailed discussion of Jeremy Bentham’s Theory of Fiction, to reveal how Iser’s own anthropological project could derive a central impulse and trajectory from his intense reading of Bentham. In particular, I am interested in how Iser interprets Bentham’s use of legal fictions to project a general theory of fiction, and how Iser then uses the concept of necessity or “need” to gradually translate and transfer Bentham’s theoretical premises to match and support his own conceptualization of the fictive, the real and the imaginary. Iser’s particular understanding of “doing fiction,” I will conclude, might be of considerable value for the interdisciplinary engagement with legal and literary fictions.

Social values of an added literacy: the case of Latgalian

ABSTRACT Reading and writing in Latgalian constitute an added literacy within a multilingual repertoire of skills and practices where Standard Latvian dominates. In this situation, the social and symbolic values of literacy and orthography are more important than their practical value in everyday life. This paper discusses the historical development and the current importance of the Latgalian written language from such a perspective. We draw on a case study on language attitudes conducted in 2019 as well as our observations of literacy practices and the public discourse around them during the past 20 years. For the case study, 47 semi-structured interviews were conducted with active members of the speech community. All respondents had a decidedly positive attitude towards the Latgalian written language and its use in public domains. Debates concern spelling standards and correctness, indicating the importance of visuality especially for lesser-used languages. Script ideologies form part of the community’s overall set of beliefs and constitute an important factor of varied Latgalian identities and lifestyles. The focus on standards may however have a negative effect on attitudes and practices. We claim that social aspects of writing, centring around identity, interlinguality, iconicity, and authority, must be considered in planning Latgalian literacy education.

“I Want to Say the Right Thing”: Developing Translingual Literacy Practices Through Early Care Educator and University Researcher Partnerships

“I Want to Say the Right Thing”: Developing Translingual Literacy Practices Through Early Care Educator and University Researcher Partnerships