Purpose: Preservice English teachers are expected to use literary theories and criticism to read and respond to literary texts. Over the past century, two of the most common approaches to literary encounters in secondary schools have been New Criticism -- particularly the practice of close reading -- and Rosenblatt's transactional theory, both of…

The article analyses in detail two lessons that were part of a larger research project on English teaching in Canada, England and Scotland. It considers whether the two English lessons are by their nature both dialogic and formative in practice. The research undertaken was carried out using arts-based criticism. It found that Eaglestone's notion…

Purpose: This paper aims to examine how evangelical teachers' religious identities influence their interpretation and teaching of texts in high school English Language Arts classrooms. Further, this paper examines how evangelical teachers make choices about how to balance the demands of their religious and teacher identities as they interact with…

Subject English is a knowledge structure that is hard to discern for many students and even teachers. The abstractions that underpin analysis and interpretation of texts can be fuzzy, even invisible. Furthermore, traditional knowledge is inadequate when it comes to websites, graphic novels and films. What guiding abstractions are relevant in…

Background: Previous research has explored the impact of different types of praise and criticism on how children experience success and failure. However, less is known about how teachers choose to deliver feedback and specifically whether they deliver person (ability) or process (effort) feedback. Aim: The aim of the current study was to use…

Manifest in research, national policy, and instructional standards, the United States has a long-documented interest in teachers as 'content experts.' Yet, research offers limited empirical examinations of teachers' discipline-specific critical content knowledges--their curricular agility in noticing and disrupting power and oppression, and…

Since the late 20th century, scholars have called for a need to broaden the aims of teaching English Literature away from its Eurocentric focus. Much effort has also been invested in making the subject more relevant through diversifying the texts studied and connecting texts to current social and global issues. It is pertinent now to ask what the…

Recent reforms to Initial Teacher Education in England are a continuation of a decades-long political project, aiming to change the whole social complex around teachers' professional education. But the most recent frameworks present some new inflections to the construction of learning, pedagogical relationships and difference. Positivist versions…

Purpose: This study aims to explore and provide empirical evidence for ways that teachers can simultaneously support students' literary reading and analytic writing through dialogic assessment, an approach to conferencing with writers that foregrounds process and integrates assessment and instruction. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses…

Supervision in Iranian private language schools is carried out by one experienced teacher supervisor with too much authority. This paper reports a novel model of supervision, namely rotatory peer-supervision, in which supervision is delegated to English as foreign language (EFL) teachers themselves. In rotatory supervision, experienced teachers…

Based on data drawn from audio recordings of a 9th grade female English teacher in Southern California and her interactions with students in her classroom, I examined how she represents the thinking and voices of her students as her students during confrontation and conflict. Analysis demonstrates how the projected ventriloquation of her students'…

This study takes a fine-grained look at the inaugural implementation of a high-stakes teacher performance assessment (the edTPA) from multiple perspectives and chronicles how participants used the reading, writing, and discussion of poetry to cope with and sometimes critique the edTPA. Teacher researchers sought to understand multiple perspectives…

This paper introduces the concept of the phallic teacher, a spectral figure negotiated in teachers' everyday work and in school-based disciplinary communities of practice. Reporting the findings of a 3-year Australian doctoral study completed in 2014, the paper looks closely at how English teachers design both curriculum and identity in an…

The purpose of this exploratory, descriptive study was to understand what and how students learn about the Holocaust in private Christian/Catholic middle and high schools. Christian schools have been criticized for putting more emphasis on teaching religion than on providing a quality education. A convenience sample of middle and secondary English…

Although teaching argumentative writing in schools is often about teaching argumentative forms, this instructional approach limits students' flexibility and choice as writers, readers, and meaning makers. An alternative method, rooted in tenets of genre theory, offers a different approach. Rather than treating argument as a static form, genre…