This cross-case qualitative study draws on poststructural notions of identity to explore the relationship between multimodal literacies of young children and their becoming identities. Although research focuses on the products or texts of multiliteracies, more research is needed to examine shifting identities in the process of students creating.…

This year-long qualitative study draws from multimodal theory and New Literacies Studies to document the digital literacy experiences of a diverse group of 2nd-graders using e-readers. Twenty-first century classrooms must expand traditional notions of literacy to prepare students for the ever-changing, media-rich world. Students participated in…

This study examines student reading engagement with children's science books in elementary classrooms. "Reading engagement" in science is conceived in terms of a Transmission-Transaction continuum. When centered on transmission, science reading entails passive reception of a textually encoded scientific message. By contrast, when science…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the mediational role of gesture and body movement/positioning between a teacher and an English language learner in a second-grade classroom. Responding to Thibault's (2011) call for understanding language through whole-body sense making, aspects of gesture and body positioning were analyzed for…

Gabriela Montserrat (pseudonym) is a Mexican-American child classified by her school district as an "emerging bilingual" and is the focus of this qualitative case study that took place at a public elementary school located in a suburban community in the southwestern US in Mrs Pérez's (pseudonym) second-grade classroom. The student's use…

As digital media practices become readily available in today's classrooms, literacy and literacy instruction are changing in profound ways (Alvermann, 2010). Professional organizations emphasize the importance of integrating new literacies (New London Group, 1996) practices into language-arts instruction (IRA, 2009; NCTE, 2005). As a result,…

This research focuses on read-aloud discussions in the classroom of an exemplary second-grade teacher, Mae Graham, during an academic year. We found the classroom environment Mae created, along with her instructional moves, fostered engagement and student-initiated talk. Our analysis affirms the importance of teachers' language in building…

This article examines the effect of a teacher's cultural representations and tacit communicative style on interactive practices in the classroom. We compare two second-grade classrooms constituted predominantly by Latino immigrant children and teachers with differing cultural representations of education. Through video and acoustic analyses of…

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine the uses of informational texts within an ethnically diverse, second grade classroom and how the teacher carefully scaffolded students' developing understandings about these texts. A community of practice theoretical framework was employed to better understand the ways in which…