Grouping students at secondary school based on attainment is a prevalent practice in English schools. Despite this, research has suggested that those placed in low attaining groups are disadvantaged by their placement. This study aimed to provide an account of student engagement, teacher interactions and pedagogical approaches employed by English…

Purpose: Using a discourse analytic approach, the purpose of this paper is to examine how genre impacts white readers when reading about historic acts of racial violence. Specifically, this study explores one white high school student's stance-taking as she read an informational text and an eyewitness narrative about the Tulsa Race Massacre.…

Today's hyper-partisan world makes civil discourse across differences seem almost impossible for many adults, let alone young people. U.S. public schools are tasked with educating our young people with the goal that they each can be productive members of society. High-school students participating in an intergroup dialogue on race as part of their…

This article features student perspectives on the role of personal writing in English class. Key findings and quotations are shared from two in-depth interviews with students who wrote exceptional personal essays as part of a narrative nonfiction unit in a 10th grade English class. Participants reported that writing personally generated more…

This paper explores students' engagement in reading poems, examining data on their self-perceptions of their confidence and competence in reading poems before, during, and after using the "I Notice" methodology as adapted from The Academy of American Poets' unit plan, "Noticing Poetry" (Slaby, 2017). The data was collected over…

This article offers playwriting and other arts-based literacies as dynamic and multifaceted alternatives to the traditional high school research paper. The authors present an analysis of what happened when a teacher asked students to conduct research on a human rights issue and represent their research in a five-scene play. They contend that…

Pakistani students at secondary school level were asked to respond to a self-reporting causal attributions beliefs scale. The scale measured eight causal beliefs about success and failure. Participants of the study included 1826 students from three districts in Punjab. Results showed that both male and female students endorsed internal…

Students who fall behind in credits in their first years of high school are at risk of not graduating. William Penn High School (WPHS) offers students who fail courses the opportunity to make up lost credits by using an online option called the WPHS Credit Recovery Program. The WPHS Credit Recovery Program is designed to keep students on the path…

Drawing on observational evidence of two classes working on "Romeo and Juliet," one in England and the other in Palestine, this essay explores the nature of knowledge in relation to English as a school subject. It asserts the importance of paying attention to the resources that students, situated in culture and history, bring with them…

Nisakorn Charumanee believes that a reading teacher has an active role in cultivating reading culture or reading habit and in activating students to "want" to read. One way to do this is to integrate extensive reading into the classroom (Day and Bamford, 1998; Bamford and Day, 2004) where extensive reading can be enhanced if the teacher…

The action research project report was created to remedy a lack of multicultural literature within the regular level sophomore English class and to assist regular level sophomore students' connection to their reading. The teacher-researcher also examined her students' own ethnic backgrounds, cultures, religions, economic status, gender, and/or…

This case study report uses the conceptual framework of Bakhtinian notions of dialogism to explore how a highly motivated 10th grade English student, Aaliyah, developed strategies for combating her disengagement in academic writing. Aaliyah?s anxiety and boredom stemmed from multiple factors relating to the distance between her home and school…

The Writing Pal (W-Pal) is a novel intelligent tutoring system (ITS) that offers writing strategy instruction, game-based practice, essay writing practice, and formative feedback to developing writers. Compared to more tractable and constrained learning domains for ITS, writing is an ill-defined domain because the features of effective writing are…

English educators at all levels have endeavored to understand difference in their classrooms both in terms of the content that they teach and in terms of the social and cultural identities of students in their classrooms. However, although educators have come a long way in understanding identity as it is constituted by race and gender, much work…

This document presents the proceedings of the 23nd Annual Research Forum held June 28, 2018, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Included are the following 12 action research papers: (1) Standards-Based Grading in a Secondary Mathematics Classroom (Michelle Anderson); (2) How the Use of Graphic Novels in Shakespeare…