The Annual Literacy Survey is a survey for teachers and other school staff, asking about their attitudes to literacy as a whole, as well as reading, writing and speaking and listening. There were responses from 1,535 teachers from across primary, secondary and other settings. As outlined in report, the survey particularly interested in how this…

This paper synthesises some of the recent studies that have made links between handwriting as an orthographic-motor strategy and the quality of pupils' learning and literacy skills. A poor standard of literacy is evident in many British school leavers and, in some cases, university graduates. The paper outlines the implication of this situation…

This paper engages with the central theme of this special issue, "From the Margins to the Centre," as a particular kind of narrative that occupies the imagination of literacy educators in the academy, particularly those who are located in the "centre," but whose experience ironically finds them "pinned to the margins"…

Set against the backdrop of children being 'alienated' from their writing, this paper is taken from a United Kingdom Literacy Association sponsored project where primary school teachers were trained to use process drama in order to give children more agency in their writing across the curriculum. Here, we use discourse analysis to think about the…

Where academic literacies are understood as situated social practices, effective academic literacy support needs to reflect the disciplinary and institutional specificity of the practices. However, the institutional separation of academic literacy teaching from disciplinary subject teaching, typical of UK universities, creates significant…

Academic Literacies and English for Specific Purposes perspectives on the teaching of academic writing tend to be positioned as dichotomous and ideologically incompatible. Nonetheless, recent studies have called for the integration of these two perspectives in the design of writing programmes in order to meet the needs of students in the…

This article reports on the design and implementation of an alternative form of writing assessment in a UK English for Academic Purposes (EAP) pre-sessional course. The assessment, termed processfolio, was a response to research inquiry into how writing assessment in a local context negated student agency and inculcated disempowering models of…

The place of grammar within the teaching of writing has long been contested and successive research studies have indicated no correlation between grammar teaching and writing attainment. However, a recent study has shown a significant positive impact on writing outcomes when the grammar input is intrinsically linked to the demands of the writing…

In order to understand the culture of the physical, virtual, and blended spheres that adolescents inhabit, we build on Gee's concept of affinity spaces. Drawing on our ethnographic research of adolescent literacies related to The Hunger Games novels, the Neopets online game, and The Sims videogames, this article explores the nature of…

We argue that the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, with its dual emphasis on literacy and occupational skills, can serve as a new model for writing classrooms and writing program administrators. We further contend that the "contact zone" classroom should be replaced with community-based "federations."…

The lived experience of academic teachers as they engage in feedback has received relatively little attention compared to student perspectives on feedback. The present study used an ethnographically informed methodology to investigate the everyday practices around undergraduates' writing of fourteen UK HE teachers, in a range of disciplines and…

The Quicken Trust has been working in Kabubbu since 2000. In that time it has created a primary school, a health centre and laboratory, teachers' and nurses' housing, community housing, clean water supplies, farming and work initiatives, an adult literacy centre and library, and a secondary school. Over 400 orphaned children are being educated and…

This book sets out to adapt and use some of the practical approaches of genre theory to the teaching of writing to English as a Second or Other Language (ESOL) and Basic Skills students in Britain. The book has 9 units exploring different types of text or genres, descriptions of people, descriptions of places, personal narratives, folk stories,…

Focuses specifically on issues related to teacher scaffolding of pupils' learning in literacy and science. Pivots around three notions: scaffolding the processes of learning in classroom; the importance of this type of scaffolding for independent learning; and the idea of appropriateness as it relates to the level of scaffolding employed by the…

A study examined the characteristics of teachers who can be shown to be effective in teaching literacy to primary pupils. Aims of the research were to: (1) identify the key factors in what effective teachers know, understand, and do which enable them to put effective teaching of literacy into practice in the primary phase; (2) identify the…