This research seeks to better understand the attitudes and dispositions of advanced-level English Language Arts students toward the activities of academic research and writing, and to explore the ways that critical pedagogies focused on authentic inquiry and composition interact with these attitudes. The project draws upon research in student…

Purpose: This study aims to explore how youth poets wrote in a community of practice and how their out-of-school poetry writing contributed toward developing disciplinary literacy. Design/methodology/approach: In this qualitative case study, the authors studied youth's writing by drafting narrative field notes, collecting student writing and…

Purpose: Spelling is a critical component of literacy and language arts that can negatively influence other aspects of written composition. This clinical focus article describes a spelling error classification system that can be used to identify underlying linguistic deficits that contribute to students' spelling errors. The system is designed to…

This article explores the ways in which the language of the hero's journey can serve as a heuristic for teachers at all stages of their professional experience. Teachers in Canada and the United States were interviewed via Skype about their experiences around writing and literacy. Four teachers are profiled here, two from Canada and two from the…

This qualitative study explored how student writers adjust to the shifting composing demands in a multitude of composing contexts: in English, in history and across the two disciplines, as well as in various modes, including alphabetically and multimodally. Naturalistic inquiry case study was applied to explore the participant's experiences with…

These are the appendices for the report, "Ohio's Plan to Raise Literacy Achievement." They include: (1) Ohio's State Literacy Team; (2) Ohio's Theory of Action; (3) Coaching in Literacy (Ohio's Coaching Model); (4) Emergent Literacy Skills that Relate to Later Forms of Conventional Reading and Writing; (5) Nelp Literacy Variables; (6)…

Purpose: In September 2014, 1,200 unaccompanied immigrant youth, from a region of Central America known for high rates of violence and homicide, enrolled in a suburban school district of New York State. This paper aims to highlight the stories of the newly arrived Central American high school youth, as told through Bilingual (Spanish/English)…

In this article, the authors present a literacy research project in which humor, popular culture, and improvisational comedy (improv) are viewed as curricular resources to engage students' minds "and" bodies in multimodal story building, following a posthuman assemblage theory approach to literacy learning. This approach takes students'…

This study examined adolescents' perspectives on their multimodal composing goals and designs when creating digital projects in the context of an English Language Arts class. Sociocultural and social semiotics theoretical frameworks were integrated to understand six 12th grade students' viewpoints when composing three multimodal products--a…

As a dance teacher in public elementary schools for the last 25 years, Janet Adams has always recognized the creative link between dance and writing, and offered her students structured opportunities to combine the two. She has also honed her management skills and kept a pretty tight ship. Creative expression, though, be it through dancing or…

This article explores the complexity of learning the literacy practices and conventions in the discipline of English language arts. Literacies are explored in the areas of writing/composition, reading/literature, and language/grammar, with attention to the situated nature of proper expression and understanding with respect to each. The author…

Now in its fourth edition, the "Handbook of Research on Teaching the English Language Arts" -- sponsored by the International Literacy Association and the National Council of Teachers of English -- remains at the forefront in bringing together prominent scholars, researchers, and professional leaders to offer an integrated perspective on…

The "Next Generation Science Standards" ("NGSS") push students to have "a deeper understanding of content" (NGSS Lead States 2013, Appendix A, p. 4). However, with the reality of high-stakes assessments that rely primarily on multiple-choice questions, how can a science teacher analyze students' written responses…

Technology integration into language arts instruction has been slow and tentative, even as information technologies have evolved with frightening speed. Today's teachers need to be aware of several extant and unchanging realities: Technology is now indispensable to literacy development; reading with technology requires new skills and…

Current educational standards call for students to engage in the skills of research and inquiry, with a focus on gathering evidence from multiple information sources, evaluating the credibility of those sources, and writing an integrated synthesis that cites evidence from those sources. Opportunities to build strong research skills are critical,…