This article describes literacy practices and outdoor activities in high school English classrooms--framed as critical rambling, a pedagogy seeking to raise awareness of issues like climate justice--with illustrations from a dissertation of teacher research and additional student work.

Strong foundational reading skills empower students to succeed both within and beyond the classroom. This Spotlight will help readers identify how much time should be spent teaching foundational reading skills; review how reading aloud to students can be a critical tool for developing literacy; investigate how teachers can support older students…

This article examines the familiar imperative for educators to cultivate affective attachments between students and reading--to foster love or ward off hate, for books. It considers the interplay of this affective economy with other "economies" of reading long theorized in literacy studies: the moral economy, promoting dominant social…

This article examines the transformation of Australian EAL/D (English as an additional language/dialect) classrooms, transitioning from a monolingual focus on Standard Australian English (SAE) to embracing plurilingual and intercultural approaches in English language and literacy teaching and learning. Employing hermeneutic phenomenological and…

In this study, we examine two teachers' talk about literacy as they describe literacy events and practices throughout multiple contexts. We draw the theoretical framework of discourse and literacy as a social practice to illustrate the potential ways these first-year English teachers talk and have talked about literacy during their time as English…

The initial and ongoing professional education of teachers to prepare them to support students' literacy development warrants research attention. The importance of meeting the needs of struggling literacy learners in secondary school does not diminish as students move through the years of schooling. This paper reports on data from the 2019…

We render in this theoretical inquiry, informed by empirical data, understandings of how preservice teachers' literacy lives come into curricular considerations of future teaching and learning in the secondary English classroom. In doing this work, we wondered about the past, present, and future lives of teachers: how might we understand the…

There has been a recent rise in research that has attuned to matters of the body in literacy learning. This article is a contribution to that emerging corpus of scholarship. Specifically, the article is a Black feminist narrative inquiry into the undertheorized role of embodiment--and relatedly, the embodied knowing that materializes as emotion or…

This paper explores GCSE English re-sits in post-16 education. The re-sit policy was introduced in England and Wales to improve national literacy rates, yet persistently poor pass rates have drawn robust criticism of the policy. This article argues that traditional discourses of literacy predominate and contribute towards antagonisms between…

The digital is inextricably woven across people's everyday lives and literacy practices, and English educators are tasked with preparing students to be critical, ethical, and agentic inventors and consumers of digital text. What has crystallized for English educators is an awareness that facilitating "digital discourse"--or the multiple…

Few juvenile justice group experimental and quasi-experimental literacy-focused studies document fidelity of implementation (FOI). Even fewer of those studies consider the psychometric properties of the FOI instrumentation used. The aim of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of a brief FOI instrument used with English language…

Awareness of vocabulary learning strategies has been identified as crucial in supporting learners' vocabulary development. Using interview data from 21 adolescent first language speakers of English identified as gifted students in the U.S. education context, I analysed the vocabulary learning strategies that they used to learn, remember, and make…

The authors examined secondary English teachers' values and beliefs about text selection (canonical versus modern and young adults) when working with emergent bilinguals. Findings showed that the tensions teachers identified were focused on whose literacy actions the teachers wanted to prioritize in the classroom: those of the students or those of…

This study examines a group of four English educators, two women of color and two white women, who self-identified as teachers for social justice as they formed a teacher inquiry group, called a teacher inquiry circle, as they attempt to become antiracist. The purpose of the inquiry circle was to answer the call to action for more equitable…

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…