Critical approaches to literature in secondary English require greater attention to narrative discourse. In this conceptual article, I provide interpretative tools from contemporary narratology and demonstrate their critical potential for high school English. In particular, I outline critical literacy's vital but overattentive focus on the…

Professional learning should be designed in a way that is responsive to the needs of teachers and intentionally planned with adult learning principles in mind. This article outlines one practitioner's professional journey to redefine how professional learning is designed with best practices in adult learning in mind. Strategies utilized during…

We adopted a person-oriented approach to identify patterns of how classroom talk and internal behavioral engagement are combined in students. The research was conducted on a sample of 639 ninth-grade students (32 classes). We measured the duration of classroom talk for each individual student during Czech language and language arts lessons. The…

According to researchers, the pandemic-induced school closures and disruption of services resulted in a massive regression of academic learning and socio-behavioral development, especially among children in developing economies. Countries have been making efforts to recover the learning and developmental losses incurred by children during the…

This comparative case study explores the roles of reading-to-write and writing-only approaches on students' L2 writing skills. Six third-year English major students from a Thai university, with diverse proficiency levels, participated in the study. Data from students' writing samples, semi-structured interviews, and observations were analyzed…

This study considers a contextualized approach to grammar instruction, asking: "Does embedded instruction using published authors as mentors improve grammar and usage for young writers?" Twenty-three students in one second-grade classroom participated. Students were taught grammar conventions through use of mentor texts for 45 minutes a…

The purpose of this explanatory mixed methods study was to understand how 9th grade honors and general education language arts students made course enrollment decisions through the lens of the Expectancy-Value (E-V) theory. A survey was administered to 9th grade students (N = 118) attending a public high school with the overall mean score…

Within gifted education, discourse-based instructional methods, such as Socratic Seminars, are identified as strategies to support the development of gifted and advanced readers' critical thinking skills. While research on dialogic discourse has centered on key components such as discourse patterns and the types of questions teachers ask, the…

Project-based learning (PBL) in inclusive classrooms has the potential to provide meaningful and collaborative learning experiences that develop students' academic and social-emotional learning skills. This qualitative study focuses on the voices of secondary students with disabilities (SWDs) by examining their perceptions of PBL in English…

Although reading comprehension research and instruction commonly focus on individuals' ability to extract meaning from text, eighth-grade students whose teachers chose to focus on engaged volitional reading, rather than comprehension, demonstrated expansive forms of meaning-making and purpose. Interviews and observations across two school years…

Listening is necessary for effective learning. Unfortunately, outside of comprehension tasks, listening is rarely emphasized as a key component of classroom instruction. This study considers a specific type of listening, sacrificial listening, theorized to help to bridge cultural, political, and religious divides by emphasizing understanding and…

Abstract concepts, such as gravity, may provide the perfect opportunity to bring phenomena into the classroom. As a knowledge generation strategy, summarizing can foster that opportunity. Using phenomena and summary writing together might help student learning since it requires making connections between their ideas and words to explain the…

Robust vocabulary instruction is an important part of comprehensive English language arts (ELA) instruction. Vocabulary instruction supports students in learning the meaning of words to build a receptive vocabulary that they can rely on to comprehend the words they read and hear. Many students with significant cognitive disabilities (SCD) and…

Purpose: This study aims to explore how teachers changed literature instruction in English language arts (ELA) classrooms following personal loss, and identifies factors influencing those changes. The author argues teachers regulated their responses to literature according to emotional rules they perceived to be associated with the teaching…

This action research described how a middle school teacher integrated five discussion protocols including structured controversy, pair communication, triad protocol, personal experience panel, and Socratic seminar into her sixth-grade Language Arts classes. Collected data from three different sources indicated an overall improvement of both…