Students bring cultural and linguistic richness to the English Language Arts classroom in the form of English language diversity; that being said, English Language Arts (ELA) education has traditionally privileged Standard American English (*SAE) and its related white culture rather than embrace the aforementioned diversity. With calls for more…

Children learning Chinese must cope with an opaque orthography lacking transparent relations between oral pronunciations and written characters: a challenge heightened for L2 learners. Use of digital Pinyin input may facilitate connections between oral and written language by allowing learners to access vocabulary they cannot yet write. We…

Disciplinary literacy is defined here as the ability to engage in social, semiotic, and cognitive practices consistent with those of content experts. Characterizing literacy development as a process of braiding 3 language strands of everyday language, abstract language, and metaphoric language, this article describes the lexical and grammatical…

Students feel more comfortable in a new language when they understand its jokes. And when the jokes are puns, they build metalinguistic awareness. This article describes four categories of English puns--soundalike puns, lookalike puns, close-sounding puns, and texting puns--and suggests how they can be incorporated into English language…

This article focuses on the connection between the visual arts and language arts with the many teaching and learning possibilities that may arise from an art curriculum infused with language arts. As a K-5 art specialist in a rural Georgia public school, the author feels passionately about the importance of interdisciplinary art education for…

In this article, we examine the relationship between classroom talk, teacher-student roles and paradigms for literacy and learning in two ninth-grade English Language Arts classes. Our goal was to understand how these roles and practices socialized students into norms for academic language and literacy as they read and wrote poetry in preparation…

This paper reports an intervention study on Singapore primary five (fifth Grade) students' ICT (information and communication technology)-mediated Chinese idiom learning. We introduced "seamless learning" to the learning design, that is, the bridging of formal and informal learning, and individual and social learning, conforming to the…

Ways in which to use "picture talk" (proverbs, similes, idioms, and witcracks) in language arts activities for elementary school students are described, including: writing and illustrating expressions; changing expressions; and interpreting expressions. (CB)

To make a spelling program more effective, use the children's spelling tests to analyse their errors and indicate spelling patterns. (JH)

Describes a technique for getting students acquainted which involves having them coin words based on each other's first names. (DD)

Students need to learn the involved patterns of sentences in the English language as well as the inherent structure. First, the paper discusses five common sentence patterns in the English language, with examples. Next, the paper deals with modifiers to extend sentences, including adjectives, adverbs, appositives, and dependent clauses. Finally,…

Examines the reading and writing processes and their interdependence and urges the language arts instructor to be an audience for children's writing and to help them become aware that what they read is someone else's writing. (HTH)

Why is it important to take a closer look at the patterns of language, or discourse, in the conversations in Reading Recovery teachers' lessons? Conversations occur throughout the lesson as teachers communicate with children and are not limited to a procedural component of the lesson related to composing. Teachers' theories of the world, literacy…

Reading success will be encouraged if children are given ample opportunity to verbally respond to first-hand experiences. (JH)