Literacy Research Project Research Articles

“Language Lives in Our Bodies Not Just in Our Heads”: Embodied Reading and Becoming Beyond the Molar

This article focuses on one aspect of a literacy research project: how reading and language enable embodied processes that allow for fluidity and becomings outside of the static, molar normative discourse in society and consequently in language education. I explain how one research participant continues becoming outside of white settler-colonial understandings of bilingual-immigrant-racialized-woman, through reading a counternarrative fiction in a book club. Using a feminist Deleuzian methodology, I blend different data to make connections drawing on Coloma, Deleuze and Guattari, and Sumara. Through the analysis of one hot spot, I explain how the participant continues becoming through her self-identification as a speaker of Spanish and English, Venezuelan, Latinx immigrant-settler woman, in ways that resist molar, binary white settler-colonial understandings of her subject positions within education and literature, and how she creates a more liveable life through molecularity or fluidity. The inclusion of counternarrative fiction is pertinent for language classrooms, as creating a more liveable life beyond white settler-colonial binaries through embodied processes of reading fiction creates many possibilities for minoritized students.

A Taxi Ride to Critical Literacy: High School Students as Co-Researchers and Text Analysts

This article describes a critical literacy research project undertaken with English Additional Language students at a South African township school. Students were invited to take on the position of researchers in gathering and analysing bumper stickers found in commuter minibuses known as itekisi (taxi). These everyday texts in English and African languages are salient for the students’ discourse communities. Bringing them into English lessons validates the use of languages and discourses that multilingual students inhabit and draws on their ability to move fluidly between languages. Framed by critical discourse analysis theory, this project aimed to facilitate students’ abilities to develop and use critical literacy knowledge and skills in analysing taxi bumper stickers. The findings indicate that the students were able to demonstrate some criticality as they investigated multiple interpretations of the texts by community members and themselves. Inviting students to investigate texts drawn from their own communities was envisaged as enabling their development as critical readers with a social justice orientation to texts. However, their relentless negativity towards taxi drivers made it difficult for them to keep their focus on the texts, suggesting that teachers’ selection of salient texts for lessons with a focus on critical literacy may not always achieve the intended outcomes.

Learning with YouTube: Beyond formal and informal through new actors, strategies and affordances

This article focuses on the results from interviews and workshops on teens’ YouTube consumption and use as part of the Transmedia Literacy research project on teens and transmedia collaborative practices carried out in eight countries from Europe, South America and Australia. The project had two main objectives: to detect what teens are doing with media and to determine how they learn to do it. During the fieldwork, YouTube was identified as one of the platforms that teens use most for learning purposes. Therefore, this article maps teenagers’ main YouTube learning topics and motivations for using the platform. We studied the video formats that teens use and the way they use them to learn a wide variety of topics. Three main areas of interest were identified: formal school curriculum, video games and technology and wellness and culture. In all three areas, teens apply the apprenticeship model of learning as they follow YouTube instructors (teachers, experts and peers) to learn about these areas. Teens highlight different YouTube affordances that motivate them to use the platform, including using it as a search engine to find specific information, using the number of views or subscribers to validate the quality of the content, being able to control the video to learn at their own pace and using it as a repository and archive to find information. Teens use YouTube both to complement their formal school curriculum and to explore their own interests. Therefore, YouTube becomes an important learning space for adolescents to learn in a continuum. This means that it is a space that blurs the boundaries between classic oppositions like formal/informal learning due to how teens use it.

Reaching for the Top

This paper draws attention to the important role school libraries, teacher-librarians, and principals can and need to play in the lives of marginalized adolescent boys in order to advance the goals of social justice and equity, and to make school libraries more relevant to citizens and communities. As an illustration of how teacher-librarians can intervene in the lives of such students, the author presents preliminary insights from a recent literacy research project that involved a school principal, a professor/school library specialist, and a professor in school leadership. Using a modified, contextually tailored version of literature circles, the researchers explored ways of enhancing the critical literacy engagement of marginalized adolescent boys in an urban school in western Canada.

Ocean Literacy to Promote Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030 in Coastal Communities

Ambassadors for Biodiversity (EmBio) is an ocean literacy research project that contributes to the improvement of literacy on marine and coastal biodiversity, namely encompassing the areas covered by the Natura 2000 Network, by promoting coastal and oceanic resources conservation and natural and cultural values preservation of the Portuguese western Atlantic coast. This project directly promotes the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the implementation of 2030 Agenda developed by the United Nations and adopted by most countries in the world, which define the priorities and aspirations for global sustainable development until the year of 2030, mobilizing a world-wide effort to meet a common set of goals and objectives. This paper contributes to understanding how ocean literacy, and specifically the EmBio research project, fits into the international agenda for sustainable development and the SDGs and its targets. Through an analysis and a comparison between the project EmBio and the SDGs, it was possible to identify connections on 11 out of 17 goals and 31 out of 169 targets, with a special emphasis on the SDG 14—Life Below Water. The results highlight the relevance of this project and, especially, ocean literacy for the accomplishment of the SDGs.

A Pre-Research Field Work Partnership Agreement Will Benefit Literacy Research Project Partnerships

Challenges exist between the university course professors, pre-service teachers, and field work partnerships in literacy education programs. This article discusses a need to create and implement a pre-research field work agreement to increase the efficiency of literacy research projects conducted between the university and the practicum school partnership. Based on collected formal and informal research, disconnects are hindering the overall literacy research project goals from being accomplished. Specific challenging issues that are identified include ensuring placement diversity, geographical issues, researcher access to records, and adequate placement opportunities within the needed content focus supported by a highly qualified mentor. Resolutions to the challenges can be better addressed if a systematic, organized pre-research field work partnership agreement is in place.

Round table: Health literacy and life skills: children and adolescents’ tools for health promotion

Abstract This round table aim is to explore transculturality of methods and instruments to assess Health Literacy (HL) and Life Skills (LS) in Childhood and Adolescence and integrate this discussion in the overall context of HL research in the European context. HL and LS focuses on the knowledge and skills that enable people to access, understand, evaluate and apply information in order to make health decisions and promote health and well-being. While research in the past focused basically on adults, HL & LS research in children and adolescents is a novel field of study. Specific study cases from France and Portugal will help frame the discussion. The CrAdLiSa (developing ChildRen and ADolescents’ health Literacy) research project is focused on exploring the usability of previous tools and instruments - already implemented in other European countries - to evaluate the feasibility of their cultural adaptation and validation. The research focuses on a public health perspective addressing qualitative, quantitative, and intervention research in context of health literacy (HL) and Life Skills (LS) and e-HL of children, adolescents, and professionals working in education, health, and social care settings. Following the track left by Nairobi (2009) and the Shangai declarations (2016) HL has evolved into a significant public health and health promotion goal which has been included to several public health policies (eg. in Portugal, the General Health Directorate of Health (GHDH), established its first policy that focused on children and adolescents HL PNSE|2015, 8815/2015 DR, II, n° 154, 10-08-2015). Present first time empirical findings and developments of these projects and open the floor for further discussion. On top of this, LS will be addressed from the methodological perspective. Thereby, it will shed light on the HL and LS of children and adolescents and link the current debate with contemporary public health approaches to advance the field of HL and LS in childhood and adolescence. The round table will include 3 presentations with up to 15 minutes input followed by discussion. The first presentation is a theory-driven project about developing a conceptual LS model adaptation for children and adolescents in France. The second will introduce a HL questionnaire and its validation data from a pilot study in 4th grade (9-10 y.o.). The third presentation will explore findings of a pilot study by using a HL measure in children (9-10 y.o.) and the relationship between functional HL and subjective health. This round table offers a forum for researchers, practitioners and policy-makers interested in HL and health promotion. By dialogue and two-way communication lively interaction and vivid discussions will be facilitated. This will allow discussing results regarding their benefit for improving HL research, practice, and policy-making, support further synergies, facilitate networking and collaboration, and support international capacity building. Key messages There is need for empirical health literacy and life skills research in children and adolescents. A more broad discussion needs to be developed regarding concepts, instruments and strategies for health literacy and life skills promotion.

What are teens doing with YouTube? Practices, uses and metaphors of the most popular audio-visual platform

ABSTRACT This article is part of the outcomes of the Transmedia Literacy research project on teens and transmedia collaborative practices carried out in eight countries between 2015 and 2018. A multi-method approach was used in the study (questionnaires, workshops, media diaries, interviews, observation of online communities) to explore what teens are doing with media. This article presents a map of the uses and practices teens make of YouTube. The metaphors of YouTube that emerged when teens put these uses and practices into discourse are also identified. Five YouTube uses were detected: radiophonic, televisual, social, productive and educative. These uses vary according to the practices performed by teens and how they are related to the logics of the YouTube platform. Moreover, the identified metaphors show the ways teens’ uses are related to their everyday routines and the way they integrate the YouTube platform into various dimensions of their social life, such as their media practices, and the way they acquire knowledge and skills.

Assembling Improv and Collaborative Story Building in Language Arts Class

AbstractIn this article, the authors present a literacy research project in which humor, popular culture, and improvisational comedy (improv) are viewed as curricular resources to engage students' minds and bodies in multimodal story building, following a posthuman assemblage theory approach to literacy learning. This approach takes students' learning beyond the skills of the six language arts strands to consider how affect, gesture, space, time, and improvisation work together in story writing. The authors invited improv artist Ben Cannon to work in collaboration with two fifth‐grade classroom teachers, their 50 students, and the research team to develop a children's comedy composing workshop. Over the course of two weeks, half‐day workshops employed improv techniques and related activities for composing comedic characters and collaborative comedic stories. In this article, the authors share some of the activities and what they learned about students' oral and written story‐building processes.

Functional Language Instruction and the Writing Growth of English Language Learners in the Middle Years

In this article the authors report on the use of a scaffolding pedagogy (Gibbons, 2009), informed by systemic functional linguistics, to support the writing of English language learners in middle years curriculum learning. They focus on the work of one teacher and her English class across the first 18 months of a longitudinal design‐based literacy research project, Embedding Literacies in the Key Learning Areas (ELK). This 3‐year project was conducted in an Australian urban secondary school with 97.5% of students from language backgrounds other than English. A core aspect of the pedagogy implemented through the ELK project is the use of a shared metalanguage to make visible the patterns of language valued for discipline learning. Analysis of instructional materials, classroom discourse, and data on students’ achievement on standardized external and formative internal assessments of writing over 18 months indicates that growth in writing is related to pedagogical practices that include consistent use of a functional metalanguage in classroom modeling of exemplar texts and in feedback on students’ writing.

Opening up a philosophical space in early literacy with <i>Little Beauty</i> by Anthony Browne and the movie <i>King Kong</i>

The article begins with setting the South African educational context for a postgraduate early literacy research project in the foundation phase (ages 4–9). The research examines how philosophy with children (P4C) might be part of a solution to current problems in reading comprehension. The second author reports on her P4C action research with her own children as well as her observations of a Grade 2 classroom in a school near Johannesburg. The research shows how the picturebook Little Beauty by Anthony Browne opens up a philosophical space within which children are allowed to draw on their own life experiences and prior knowledge. The project reveals the depth of their thinking when making intra-textual connections between Little Beauty and the movie King Kong. The facilitated philosophical space also makes it possible for the children to make complex philosophical links between the emotion anger, destructive behaviour and the ethico-political dimensions of punishment. Central to this article are the second author’s critical reflections on how her literacy practices as a mother and foundation phase teacher have fundamentally changed as a result of this project. The article concludes with some implications for the teaching of early literacy in South Africa.

Popular culture, participation and progression in the literacy classroom

AbstractIn this paper, I share an account of what happens when a teacher values children's experiences of popular culture in a classroom activity. Drawing on a socio‐cultural approach to learning, I suggest that children are not simply enthused when their lived cultures are valued in the classroom but more fundamentally that they are motivated because they can participate in (and are not excluded from) the learning that is constructed. Drawing on data from a recent media literacy research project, I aim to demonstrate the necessity of including popular culture experiences in literacy teaching in order to ensure that children are able to articulate and develop key conceptual understandings. Furthermore, I suggest that interrogatory pedagogic strategies, including practical productions, are key to ensuring that children are able to make explicit, and then organise and develop their conceptual understandings.

Information literacy cooperation by design: Review of a guided collaboration between teaching and library faculty

1The overall goal of the Pre-College Information Literacy Research (PILR) project was to increase and improve IL instruction sessions in pre-college courses while evaluating student achievement of IL outcomes. The project included many valuable tools to guide instructional collaboration, including a project-specific rubric for IL, guided assignment sheets, assessments of instruction and assignments, and guidelines for shared assessing of student achievement. 2 By using these tools, librarians and instructional faculty members could arrive at a shared understanding of student achievement. Reviewing how faculty members and librarians responded to this aspect of the PILR project provides insight into building success into IL collaboration.

Teachers’ use of a school library in a South African township school: closing the literacy gap

This post-project study investigates the use of the school library at a primary school by teachers at the end of a literacy project, without the guidance of the project facilitators at the school. The article gives background information about the Academic Literacy Research Project Unit (ALRU) from the University of South Africa which established a school library at school P as part of the literacy research project. The aim of the Literacy Project was to improve literacy levels and create a strong reading culture that would later have a positive impact on the academic progress of learners at school P. The Literacy Project involved training teachers in literacy and reading matters. In addition to the teacher training, a school librarian was trained to manage the school library. At the onset of the post-project study, self-administered questionnaires were drawn up to collect data on the teachers' school library practices after withdrawal of the project team. The questionnaires included qualitative and quantitative questions. The findings suggest that the school library is being utilised and appreciated as an integral part of the learning process; however, the teachers seem to need further exposure and training on information literacy. The authors hope that the information and interpretations provided in this article will be helpful in achieving the goal of quality education in South Africa and especially in improving the reading and literacy levels of all learners.

A Reading Strategy for a UK university:

This paper represents a starting point in an information literacy research project by academic librarians in a UK university. The research project explores ways of enabling and encouraging quality student reading through the development of a University Reading Strategy, a set of best-practice ideas and guidelines drawn from discussions with academics, support staff and librarians. The purpose of the paper is to review current issues around reading, particularly in the HE sector, in contemporary literature. The literature review is intended to provide a backdrop for the research project, giving benchmark information against which the developing Reading Strategy may be considered. The literature review considers the UK Government’s current agenda for enhancing skills levels throughout the adult population. Economic and social challenges to traditional understandings of autonomous learning in HE are reflected in changes in learning and reading styles, and in the changing use of academic libraries. Alongside this the digital environment, within which most young people are comfortable and competent, continues to change reading habits and demand different information seeking skills. Public and academic libraries have to find ways to survive and grow in the new Web 2.0 world. Academic learning through new modes of reading has to be increasingly recognised. In spite of these changes the printed book remains a key element in academic library services. Students continue to demand print texts and the textbook market appears to be thriving. This literature review suggests that traditional reading skills remain at the heart of university education, but that new modes and media for reading can be used creatively to enhance student learning.

Languages and literacies in early childhood: At home and in early childhood settings

SUMMARY This paper reports on one aspect of a collaborative early childhood literacy research project in New South Wales, Australia, where two government departments and three universities investigated the language and literacy environments of preschool age children at home and in settings. Researchers observed and rated the environments of 80 early childhood settings, followed by interviews with staff members working in the setting as well as focus group discussions with representative family members. The project focused on families and settings of children from Aboriginal, bilingual and low socio-economic backgrounds. In settings with strong levels of congruence between family and staff perspectives on early literacies, both stakeholders shared understandings of cultural and family practices, in comparison to those settings where shared understandings about diverse literacies were not present.

Teacher to Teacher: How Do You Test Your Students' Knowledge of What You Teach?

Crist explains how she and her school help students cope with the MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System) exam. Shafer describes her end-of-the-year literacy research project.

Literacy and technology studies: Past, present, future

In this presentation, I examine what we have learned from research about the complex connections between literacy, technology and learning. The beginnings of research in this area coincided with the introduction of PCs into educational settings in the late 1970s. For the first decade, researchers asked the kinds of questions best explored using quantitative methods. They set out to determine whether the use of computers enhanced writing. The findings, however, were equivocal. By contrast, sociocultural understandings of literacy, which became more widely accepted in the mid-80s, provoked a different research orientation and different kinds of questions. The Digital Rhetorics project (Lankshear et al 1997) is an example of research informed by the recognition of literacy as social practice. Further, it exemplifies the shift towards qualitative research approaches in the field of literacy and technology studies. To provide a context for the concurrent sessions and panel discussion that follow mine, I include an overview of the Digital Rhetorics project, giving particular attention to its sociocultural perspective and qualitative methodology. Finally, I consider future directions for research and practice in this area. We have reached what could be called a maturing of the field of literacy and technology studies. The research agenda is fertile with possibilities. The challenge is to undertake studies that will continue to inform effective practice, mediated by new communication and information technologies, at all levels of education. Bio-details: Dr Ilana Snyder is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education, Monash University. Her teaching and research focuses on the new literacies and changes to pedagogical practices associated with the use of digital media and telecommunication technologies. Two books, Hypertext: the electronic labyrinth, (Melbourne University Press 1996) and Page to screen: Taking literacy into the electronic era (Allen & Unwin 1997), explore these changes. She was one of the team of nine investigators in the DEETYA-funded literacy and technology research project, Digital Rhetorics (Lankshear et al 1997). With Colin Lankshear and Bill Green, she has co-authored Teachers and Technoliteracy: Managing literacy, technology and learning in schools, which draws on the final report. It will be published by Allen and Unwin in March 2000.

Evaluation of a Whole-School Approach to Prevention and Intervention in Early Literacy

Despite the best efforts of teachers, a significant proportion of students continue to fail to achieve success in early literacy at school, with severe consequences for their subsequent educational progress, career opportunities, and life chances. In this article, we report results arising from an initial evaluation of a project to develop and implement a whole, school approach to prevention and intervention in early literacy based on similar design elements to those of Success for All. The project, known as the Early Literacy Research Project (ELRP), is currently being implemented in Victoria, Australia, in a sample of 27 schools. We outline the origins of the project, describe the way in which the intervention is being developed, and present results from the 1st full year of implementation.

Patterns of Communication in a Rural Greek Village

To what extent does the category of information controllers who, hypothesis fit the communications behavior of because of their ownership of radios, are in a a relatively undeveloped area? In this study position to control the flow of news. of a rural Greek village, the author finds that The author, now Assistant Director of a in an area having low literacy and meager research project being sponsored by the Puerto access to the mass media, the importance of Rican government, wrote this report when he the opinion leader is enhanced and, to some was on the staff of the Bureau of Applied extent, formalized. He also distinguishes a Social Research at Columbia University.