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…

Research in literary response indicates that in classroom contexts, high school students have difficulty constructing thematic interpretations of literary texts, tending instead to summarize or build happiness-bound morals that ignore a text's potentially negative tones. However, studies in out-of-school contexts show students building thematic…

Purpose: Little research has been done exploring the nature of multilingual students who are not categorized as English language learners (ELLs) in English language arts (ELA) classes. This study about a group of multilingual girls in an ELA class led by a monolingual white teacher aims to show how, when a teacher makes space for translanguaging…

As part of an ethnographic study of a secondary English Language Arts classroom, one teacher took a critical translingual approach to curriculum and instruction, encouraging students to engage in translanguaging and to explore the intersections of language with power and identity. The larger study's central question was, what does participation in…

To engage in critical praxis, teachers of literary response writing need concepts and methods for understanding the efficacy of teaching practices in helping students develop particular dispositions towards texts and the social issues they represent. In this article, the author uses concepts from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) and Systemic…

The author argues that English teachers are in a unique position to respond to death through writing, reading, and speaking. She describes four experiences and offers specific, language-based responses guided by experience and literature.

Purpose: Unlike formalist and functional approaches to literacy and teaching writing, a languaging theory approach centers on the dynamic and interpersonal nature of writing. The purpose of this study was to determine students' ability to engage in explicit reflection about their languaging actions in response to their personal narrative writing…

This study examined the relationship between ninth-grade students' use of connectives (temporal, causal, adversative, and additive) in functional writing and performance on standards-based/criterion-referenced measures of reading and writing. Specifically, structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques were used to examine the relationship between…

This study investigates the quality of the writing tasks assigned to native Spanish speakers in bilingual (Spanish-English) contexts, and the relationship between task quality and students' use of an academic register in their native language. Fifty-six language arts tasks were collected from 26 grade 4 and 5 teachers, and four student writing…

This paper describes how adolescent students responded to a poetry workshop in an English classroom where the content was derived from their knowledge from their various life experiences and understanding of world events. Informed by theories of New Literacy Studies, ethnographic methods of participant-observation were used to document an eighth…

Four units in a junior high school language arts program--literature, rhetoric, language, and reading--are presented in this curriculum guide. The introduction argues that a viable language arts program should be relevant to the immediate needs of the students, should emphasize self-discovery, and should attempt to unify the content and process of…

Considers language growth of secondary school students in terms of their using language to organize real experiences, their awareness of audience, and their ability to manage language for specific purposes and situations. Provides anecdotes of classroom conditions that promoted such student language growth. (RL)

The competencies established for the language arts program for kindergarten through sixth grade in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, are listed in this document, which indicates grade levels for introducing particular skills, developing skills, and mastering skills. Tests to assist teachers in measuring students' progress in listening comprehension,…

Presented in this publication are the findings from a selected group of 52 studies conducted by graduate students at the University of Kansas. Undertaken as research for masters' and doctoral degrees, these studies are limited to problems occupying public school teachers of grades 7-13. Specific areas of the research are grammar and usage (6…