Although authors often create literary texts in order to comment on issues of personhood and human relationships, reading and writing about literary texts in schools is often focused on close analysis of literary elements or exploration of one's own experience with the text. Thus, students' written arguments about literature typically do little…

In this article, the authors share an account of an eighth-grade personal narrative unit designed to support students in composing accounts of life during the 2020-21 pandemic school year. The article provides an overview of the four phases that comprised this nine-lesson unit and the materials and resources used. Students' voices, perspectives,…

The study was a pilot intervention to develop Year 5-8 students' close reading and writing of literary texts using the T-Shape Literacy Model (Wilson and Jesson in Set Res Inf Teach 1:15-22, 2019). Students analysed text sets to explore how different authors use language to engender mood and atmosphere. The study used a single-subject design logic…

Purpose: By engaging levels of W/writerliness, this paper aims to identify how English Language Arts teachers' personal and professional W/writerly identities impact their performance of pedagogical agency. Design/methodology/approach: In this narrative inquiry, the author draws on theories of writing identity and agency to analyze how four…

This study theorizes two new constructs--"reflection" and "refraction"--for teaching argumentative writing about literature in secondary classrooms. Derived from a year-long ethnographic study and through contextualized analysis of a student's essay, it examines a Latinx student's argument about the novel "Sing, Unburied,…

In the English classroom, narrative writing is often separated from the work of reading literature or used merely to coax reluctant students into discussing textually relevant topics. This article discusses a close writing activity, Image Explosion, that engages students in narrative writing that brings attention to the smallest details of…

Drawing on a larger year-long ethnography at a public, urban, comprehensive high school in the Midwestern United States, this article describes the texts students composed in a co-taught sophomore (grade 10) humanities course combining social studies and English language arts. Bringing together sociocultural perspectives on literacy and…

The pandemic led many schools to invest in technology that remains in classrooms today. The abrupt changes did not leave much time for professional development or planning time on how to use these digital tools to support literacy development effectively. Educators continue to grapple with how to use this technology to support language arts,…

This study investigates how young elementary children engage with conceptions of gender in connection to video gameplay in the language arts classroom. During a three-week unit on video game literacies in a multiage lab school, children learned about, played, discussed, and wrote about video games. Student writing, game reviews, and literature…

Thinking at the nexus of epistemic injustice, childhood studies, transgender studies, and gender and racial justice in literacy education, this article illustrates how curricular engagement with questions of age, gender, race, and power can simultaneously complicate and flatten knowledge about power relations. Drawing from a yearlong ethnography…

It is observed that individuals have problems in written expression in the Turkish education system, and a permanent solution can not be developed to solve these problems. Therefore, the primary objective of this research is to determine the problems of prospective Turkish teachers in paragraph creation. This research was carried out in the…

This article provides a replication study of the National Writing Project's College, Career, & Community Writers Program (C3WP), which was found to be effective at improving student writing quality in two prior studies. C3WP is designed to improve students' source-based argument writing through intensive teacher professional development,…

This study identifies the various functions of open questions in whole-class teaching in language arts classrooms in primary school, and it explores how these questions may work as a mediating tool. Open questions are considered a valuable tool in classroom discourse, enhancing dialogue and students' learning by giving the students an opportunity…

This study highlights a cross-course collaboration around children's literature and grammar in one teacher preparation program. Pre-service teachers created digital picture books and video feedback for their peers in which they ultimately adopted shifting stances in thinking like readers and writers throughout their process. By situating reading…

This study focused upon a sequence of three inquiry assignments with pre-service teachers (PSTs) in English language arts in an advanced composition and theory methods course. Place conscious and critical literacy scholars argue for a deeper understanding of rural lifeways and note the deficit or lesser than assumptions associated with rural…