Building on the research on translanguaging practices in classrooms (e.g. García, 2009; Sayer, 2011) and immigrant families' literacy practices (e.g. Gregory et al., 2004; Li, 2006), this qualitative study explores the nature of translanguaging practices of four Korean bilingual children and their families in home literacy events. Participant…

This study investigated power relations in a graduate seminar on "Literacy learning and knowledge acquisition." Three categories were examined in relation to ideological assumptions: students' expectations, institution's expectations, and teachers' perceptions of their roles as guided by their teaching perspectives. The study aimed at…

This study seeks to explore the hybrid cultural and linguistic spaces that Portuguese immigrants create in Macau in the process of engaging in intercultural communication with the Chinese local community. I use critical discourse analysis to examine data collected through in-depth interviews and observations in order to arrive at an understanding…

Literacy coaches are in the business of helping to create some kind of change--change in teaching practice, change in school policy, change in curriculum, or change in teachers and children themselves. But the social interactions necessary for change to happen, such as in-classroom consultations conducted by a literacy coach, are often fraught…

This paper is based on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in the periphery of Banjul, the capital of The Gambia. It explores relations between the gender roles of women with modest educational achievement and their uses of literacy and numeracy. The paper applied New Literacy Studies theoretical framework of literacy as a "social…

Multiliteracies pedagogy has played an important role in the way classrooms worldwide conceptualize literacy learning. And yet, some argue, its orientation toward literacy by design, with an ultimate focus on the production of transformed texts, may narrow the very possibility of opening students' social futures that it seeks to promote. Recent…

What does it mean to be engaged, especially when it comes to literacy learning? It is this question that drove my doctoral research in 2007 when I became a participant observer in a grade two classroom with the goal of making the everyday visible while sharing a greater understanding of classroom life in relation to engagement. Six years later, I…

In the current schooling climate, literary competence is increasingly viewed as students' ability to read fiction and nonfiction texts, and then articulate their comprehension of surface-text features (e.g., plot, character, setting, and conflict) through structured settings, such as standardized tests. As a way to argue against the privileging of…

This paper is derived from a wider small-scale study of digital literacy practice that explores the ways in which a multilingual seven-year-old child, Bablu, interacts with his grandmother during Internet activities connected to Qur'anic literacy. The study aims to reveal how intergenerational learning support was given to Bablu by his…

Using a case study design, this study investigated the literacy identity, both collectively and individually, of the members of "Slammin!", a slam poetry team from an urban high school. Participant observation of practices and performances was used to find how the involvement in this group uniquely impacted students' academic and personal lives.…

In this paper, we present excerpts from ethnographic data collected when a diverse classroom of children, some of whom were multilingual and others monolingual in English, used iPads to make videos. We discuss the practices, social relations, objects and material conditions that emerged as the children engaged in this production, with special…

Dominant perspectives of basic writers' self-sponsored literacies tend to overlook the important roles such activities can play in literate development. Drawn from texts, interviews, and participant-observations collected during a five-year study, this article continues the examination of the relationship between one writer's curricular and…

This qualitative case study examined a state-run, foundation-funded initiative to introduce literacy coaching in a medium-sized urban high school district over a period of two years. Data analyses revealed the complex development and multiple understandings of the process of literacy coaching on the secondary level. The role of the coaches…

In this article, the author utilizes critical and sociocultural approaches to race, language and culture to examine the intersectional experiences of a multiethnic and "mixed race" cohort of students in an inner-city, working-class neighborhood between their elementary and high school years. This article examines the students'…

This participant observation research study explored relationships between the role of guided reading and in-school writing of three proficient first-grade literacy learners during the first eight months of the 2007-08 school-year. Portraits of each student as a literacy learner were developed through case studies. Those individual case studies…