To develop a love of reading in the young, teachers need rich repertoires of children's literature and other texts. However, the significance of this subject knowledge is rarely given the attention it deserves in policy, practice, or training contexts. This article, drawing on survey data from England and Finland, underlines these concerns. It…

Dialogic teaching--a pedagogical approach that involves students in a collaborative construction of meaning and is characterized by shared control over the key aspects of classroom discourse--has been largely advocated by contemporary research and theory. However, studies in the US and UK continue to document the persistence of monologic…

The IMSCI model for teaching writing scaffolds the instruction so that students understand the features of a genre, see the teacher model writing a text in the target genre, participate in the creation of a text in the genre (through shared or collaborative writing), and independently write a text in the genre. This model is based on social…

An instructional focus on critical literacy (CL) encourages students to become active readers and writers of cultural texts so that they can create their own meanings in order to shape and transform their social conditions (Lankshear & McLaren, 1993; Shor, 1992). It is, however, seldom pursued with English learners (ELs) because teachers…

This article examines assessment of students' visual literacy. In the context of current theory of multimodal texts, the author presents key features for visual literacy assessment and how this assessment might be undertaken. The article then proposes a set of principles and a framework for developing assessment tasks in authentic classroom…

This column focuses on the innovative strategies some teachers from Kazakhstan and Oceania are using to overcome the challenges they face. In Kazakhstan, schools organize reading days to encourage and inspire children to read. In the predominantly oral culture of the Cook Islands, Niue Island, and Rarotonga, teachers and administrators model…

Emphasizes, with reference to Piaget, the importance of cooperative learning. Presents a text model describing the four aspects/participants of literal communication, and asserts that children confront a text from all aspects simultaneously. Describes three examples of interpersonal reading and writing activities observed in Austrian classrooms.…