This paper provides an overview of the Reading Wars as a site of discursive struggle. Using a digital sociological account of online events associated with the 2018 Phonics Debate hosted by the Australian Centre for Educational Research and the think tank the Centre for Independent Studies, this paper works to illuminate and challenge contemporary…

This article is written for educators who serve as teachers, administrators, policy-makers in childcare settings, schools, classrooms, teacher preparation programs, programs that prepare educational researchers, and universities. Its purpose is to provide background, rationale, and support for individuals within those institutions to address the…

Despite the increasing levels of cultural and linguistic diversity represented in Australian classrooms, many universities do not adequately prepare teachers to teach English as an additional language or dialect (EAL/D). Moreover, in neoliberal educational regimes, teaching tends to remain steadfastly focused on monolingual conceptions of literacy…

This study investigated the effectiveness of ABRACADABRA (ABRA), a web-based literacy program, developed by the Center for the Study of Learning and Performance at Concordia University, in facilitating the literacy attainment of third-grade primary school students in an area of rural China. Researchers shared the experiences of localizing ABRA to…

This paper focuses on the importance of children's out-of-school experiences as their popular culture and discusses how such experiences contribute to their creativity and critical thinking. In addition to this, the paper also discusses the critical role of researchers' values in terms of how values affect the design and process of research. From…

What insights emerge through researcher reflections on a Design-Based Research (DBR) curricular integration project that contribute to the professional learning of education faculty/researchers? To answer this question, two researchers captured their debriefing discussions and reflections after monthly meetings with participating teachers. The…

Donna E. Alvermann, Distinguished Research Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia in Athens, received recognitions and honors as a scholar/leader in adolescent literacy. Her thoughts about contexts for literacy learning challenge that the divide between in- and out-of-school literacy learning is real and needs…

Rogoff (2003) argues that "Human development is a cultural process….People develop as participants in cultural communities" (p. 3). Children develop within families, and different cultures reflect differences in how they structure activity for this development. For example, middle class North American families generally would not permit…

In this review, we lay the groundwork for an interdisciplinary conversation between literacy education research and relevant neuroscience research. We review recent neuroscience research on correlates of proposed cognitive subprocesses in text decoding and reading comprehension and analyze some of the methodological and conceptual challenges of…

As former middle and high school English teachers, secondary English teacher educators, and educational researchers, the authors were challenged to negotiate the worlds of their research center and the various schools where they worked with teachers. They used the CLASS system to mediate meetings between researchers and teachers participating in…

Discourse analysis reveals how the meanings of literacy are socially produced, communicated, and mediated. A consultation with university teacher-education and adult education researchers, managed by the National Literacy Secretariat, is used to demonstrate how the outcomes were influenced by the discourses of participants and organizers. An…

This article describes both the process and products of a cooperative inquiry project between two educational researchers--one from literacy education and one from mathematics education. The collaboration took place in an undergraduate, inquiry-based mathematics classroom in which the researchers sought to develop a shared vision of learning and…

This final report discusses the Reader Development Program (RDP) of the Free Library of Philadelphia's English as a Second Language (ESL) Adult Literacy Instructional Materials Project. Project goals were to identify and review ESL adult literacy instructional materials developed by ESL practitioners. These objectives were accomplished by several…

Staff members of a state literary resource center surveyed their practitioner clients to determine how they viewed research and the kinds of uses they made of it. Mail surveys were sent to all of the 404 adult education and English as a second language program directors in the state, and followup telephone interviews were conducted with 16 of the…

The Adult Literacy and Numeracy Australian Research Consortium (ALNARC) received sponsored research funding to study adult literacy and numeracy, network with field-based stakeholders, and disseminate findings. It studied these three layers of participant involvement and response to the sponsored research program: research leaders; sponsored…