Background: Despite large-scale interventions aimed at developing literacy skills, children's reading competence levels in South Africa continue to remain an area of concern. In addition, the need to prepare learners for the increased demands of a fast-changing world of learning and working is gaining attention in educational policy and practice.…

ntroduction: Despite increases in research and implementation, physical literacy continues to be largely misinterpreted by practitioners. The purpose of this study was to devise, implement, and evaluate a professional development program that works in a primary school environment to enhance their knowledge and operationalization of physical…

This paper examines the ways in which multilingual educators view the development of their own professional identity as teachers of reading and literacy. Teachers who themselves possess biliteracy knowledge and skills are well-positioned to leverage their own understandings of language and literacy to engage their students' development in making…

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, which will be briefly referred to as CEFR in this article, is accepted as a reference by academics working for the Council of Europe Committee on Languages. It sets the criteria for the teaching of any language as a foreign language. It aims to assess and evaluate foreign language…

There is considerable concern regarding our nation's literacy skills. Research has repeatedly shown that the literacy trajectory is well established very early in the school career. Early childhood educators (ECEs) have the ability to influence a child's literacy skills provided they have the required knowledge and tools. Professional development…

Teacher knowledge of reading is an important aspect of teacher quality, though limited research has investigated its associations with how classroom teachers report using instructional strategies to engage students in reading. Factor analysis of 28 instructional strategy items led to five self-reported instructional foci among 66 kindergarten and…

Schools are an excellent setting through which to promote mental health and well-being, and teachers are well positioned to provide related instruction and support in the classroom. However, teachers often report that they lack the knowledge, skills and confidence to deliver social emotional learning instruction and to support students who…

In this article, we describe lessons learned from three separate literacy professional learning initiatives that took place in elementary schools in three different locations: high-poverty urban, medium-poverty rural, and low-poverty suburban. The professional learning initiatives were also diverse in scope: one was a three-year, school-wide…

This article describes the development of an instrument to measure teachers' knowledge of vocabulary development and instruction, the Teacher Knowledge of Vocabulary Survey (TKVS). This type of knowledge has become increasingly important as all classroom teachers are expected to help students meet language and literacy standards that include…

Educators across the nation have been responding to the push for content-area literacy instruction in their systems. While the press for higher academic standards has sharpened national focus on the reading of complex, discipline-specific informational texts, educators have been grappling with how to help science, social studies, and vocational…

Preparing mainstream classroom teachers to work with culturally and linguistically diverse learners is a growing concern in education as more and more schools host increasing numbers of students whose primary language is not English. Unfortunately, significant numbers of teachers have had little preparation for working with these diverse learners…

Many K-12 teachers struggle to meet the needs of diverse learners as school reforms promote new disciplinary literacy requirements. In response, language education scholars have argued that teachers must develop "disciplinary linguistic knowledge" (DLK), or an understanding of language in their content area and an ability to design…

While families play a vital role in the early literacy skills of young English Learners, their educators often do not share the same backgrounds or cultures, and may not know how to connect with parents who are linguistically and culturally different. As part of a year-long grant funded professional development project, the authors led teams of…

This article examines how secondary English teachers in two racially diverse schools--one in Massachusetts, USA, the other in Ontario, Canada--described their knowledge of and practices for teaching about race and racism. The extent and quality of teachers' racial literacy knowledge and practice were considered in light of the literature on racial…

Research has demonstrated the impact of early oral language development on a child's later reading comprehension. Additionally, research has suggested that teachers' knowledge of effective practices in literacy plays an important role in students' ability to learn to read. The problem is that preschool teachers' knowledge of…