This exploratory sociolinguistic study examined D/discourses and writing modes in a Grade 10 English literature classroom wherein students answered literature-based questions by means of both traditional and new literacies approaches. Studies conducted at the intersection of classroom instruction and online affinity spaces are still surprisingly…

Locating itself broadly within the "sociolinguistics of mobility" (Blommaert, 2014) and taking heed of Stornaiuolo and Hall's (2014) call to "trace resonance" in writing and literacies research, this article works to trace academic literacies across the emerging "literacy sponsorscapes" (Wargo, 2016a) of contemporary…

What resources do students draw on to produce literary theory in the contemporary high school English classroom? This interactional sociolinguistic study traces the production and distribution of Lexical, Structural, and Thematic resources across genre chains in reading, writing, and discussing literary theory during an intensive 3-week short…

This paper looks at reading in French immersion and how learning French is seen more as a skill rather than a social practice that could be examined through a more critical lens. Most of the teachers often teach students how to read but rarely will they discuss the role of French in Canadian society and how this is manifested in the texts they…

The field of literacy studies has seen decades of calls for scholarship and instruction that address issues of dialect diversity, identity, and power but few empirical studies that document students' engagement in classroom activities designed to address these issues. The goal of this article is to describe how three bidialectal African American…

This paper is drawn from a larger study investigating high school students' participation in group discussions of public issues and the nature of those discussions. An interpretive approach was adopted to research democratic, deliberative discussion, viewed through a multidisciplinary lens influenced by sociolinguistics, speech communication,…

This paper reports on an ethnographic study of classroom practices in a township school in the Wesbank settlement near Cape Town, South Africa. Focusing on the ways in which a multilingual and highly diverse student population confronts English literacy, we argue for a view in which norms are seen as emergent and contingent on occasion, place,…