The purposes of this qualitative study, viewed through the New Literacy Studies (NLS) theoretical lens, were to explore third grade students' literacy practices as they composed multimodal informational texts in a digital writing workshop; and examine how these students composed multimodally in a digital format and what their perspectives were on…

This study explores American and Greek primary pupils' visual images of scientists by means of two nonverbal data collection tasks to identify possible convergences and divergences. Specifically, it aims to investigate whether their images of scientists vary according to the data collection instrument used and to gender. To this end, 91…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how Hispanic ESL/literacy learners used their socio-historical experiences and multimodal resources to mediate interpretation and representation of "Cinderella". Eighteen third-grade pupils "read" the video and re-created their understandings in pictures and sentences. The findings suggest that (a)…

The 160 third, seventh, and eleventh-graders involved in this study agreed, almost unanimously, that reading was "important." Participants cited the empowering benefits of reading as they justified this opinion. However, with regards to the enjoyment of reading, fewer middle and high school participants reported "liking"…

This article provides micro analysis of one representative incident from a larger qualitative study to examine how third-grade bilingual students and their teacher negotiated academic disciplinary and popular culture discourses in a social studies unit on Jamestown and Pocahontas. Informed by discourse and linguistic analyses, this study explores…

Action Potential Science Experience (APSE) is a five-day summer camp offering science opportunities for K-8 students. The focus of the APSE curriculum is to teach science concepts and methods while challenging the participants to solve an overarching problem from the popular-culture context. The participants in the APSE entitled Burger 'N Fries…

This article reports on a study of how third-grade bilingual students drew from everyday resources, particularly popular culture, in science classes and how the use of these resources shaped how they made sense of academic texts. Six months of data collection in an urban Midwestern school demonstrated that students--especially English-language…

Even the youngest readers and writers in today's classrooms can benefit enormously from engagement with a wide range of traditional and nontraditional texts. This teacher-friendly handbook is packed with creative strategies for introducing K-3 students to fiction, poetry, and plays; informational texts; graphic novels; digital storytelling;…