Historically, male students have been known to score lower than their female counterparts in reading and writing on standardized measures of academic success. While scholars, teachers, and even policymakers have attempted to explain and mitigate this gender gap in reading and writing scores, male students have had little opportunity to offer their…

This research seeks to better understand the attitudes and dispositions of advanced-level English Language Arts students toward the activities of academic research and writing, and to explore the ways that critical pedagogies focused on authentic inquiry and composition interact with these attitudes. The project draws upon research in student…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is an exploration of stories told by multilingual students participating in a literacy project in a secondary English course as part of a larger three year practitioner inquiry study, in which the author analyzed students' literacy project to create a culturally responsive English curriculum. In this paper, the…

Awareness of vocabulary learning strategies has been identified as crucial in supporting learners' vocabulary development. Using interview data from 21 adolescent first language speakers of English identified as gifted students in the U.S. education context, I analysed the vocabulary learning strategies that they used to learn, remember, and make…

The purpose of this semester-long project was to redesign the ninth grade English language arts curriculum to include a literacy-based multicomponent intervention to meet the needs of developing readers, while simultaneously maintaining a rigorous curriculum challenging proficient readers in a general education classroom. I examined peer-reviewed…

The authors explore foundational ideas of disciplinary literacy and articulate a research-based heuristic for teaching disciplinary literacy in English language arts: generating, weaving, and curating. The authors apply the heuristic to the classroom, arguing that high school teachers should explicitly enhance students' opportunities for…

This study delves into the disparity in academic performance between students of color and their white counterparts, the former performing three to five years behind. To address this issue, a qualitative and interpretive descriptive study was conducted to investigate how schools address learning opportunities for students of color, employing…

Audiobooks have been growing in popularity over the last decade. Although researchers have increasingly recognised the value of audiobooks as rich multimodal texts that support literacy engagement in classrooms, there have been few detailed pictures of classroom practice related to audiobooks. In this practitioner narrative, a secondary English…

Purpose: This study aims to discuss the ethical and political possibilities offered by the presence of teaching artists (TAs) and visual artwork in racially and culturally diverse high school literacy (English Language Arts) classrooms. Design/methodology/approach: This study explores episodes from two separate ethnographic studies that were…

Many high schools in the United States are contending with modest student writing achievement and looking for ways to enhance teachers' writing instruction. This is especially the case for schools deemed to be "underperforming" and struggling to reform writing pedagogy against an accumulation of teacher and leadership turnover, limited…

Drawing from theories of identity, language, and race, we conceptualize gateway moments to literate identities in high school English language arts classrooms enrolling language-minoritized youth. Gateways were interactions that afforded particular kinds of literate identities for youth. Deficit literate identities often invoked racialized…

The authors examine the functions of literacy in three accountability-driven English language arts classrooms. To explore the interplay between transmission-oriented, standards-based instruction and local interpretations and uses of literacy, they employed Pennycook's (2010) notion of relocalization. The authors examine how accountability…

This paper presents data from an Australian high school classroom, investigating how students and their teacher negotiate readings of literature in order to arrive at meanings that are valued by subject English, as well as understood by the students. Subject English acts a vital agent for the transmission of both literacy and literary knowledge in…

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…

Inspired by a recognition of high school students' frequent disengagement during reading and their lack of comfort and confidence with finding ways to engage with texts, the purpose of this research was to examine the impact of social-media formatted low-stakes writing tasks in the high school English classroom. Drawing from research on writing…