English Teaching: Practice & Critique: Volume 20 Issue 3

“I like the first slide. I like how we put it like that [words and pictures on a diagonal]:” composing multimodal texts in a grade four classroom

Amy Seely Flint, Rebecca Rohloff, Sarah Williams

Young children often enter formal schooling with a range of digital experiences, including using apps on tablets and engaging with interactive educational toys. The convergence…

Rewriting deficit storylines: the positioning of one fourth-grader as comics expert

Stephanie Francesca Reid, Lindsey Moses

This study took place in an elementary English language arts classroom during a comics writers workshop unit and focused on one fourth-grade author. This paper aims to explain how…

Empowerment through rejection: challenging divisions between traditional, authentic and critical writing pedagogy

Meghan E. Barnes, Heather Coffey

The purpose of this study is to inquire into the effectiveness of authentic writing instruction embedded in a critical service-learning project in a middle school English Language…

Literacy practices as social: relational-keys in literacy events

Faythe Beauchemin

The purpose of this paper is to work toward more fully conceptualizing literacy practices as social by theorizing the combined relational and intellectual context for learning…

Focusing on sociopolitical issues in a secondary sports literature class: opportunities and experiences

Luke Rodesiler

Following recent scholarship promoting the study of sports-related texts as a vehicle for examining sociopolitical issues, this study aims to identify methods and materials used…

Teaching literature following loss: teachers’ adherence to emotional rules

Mandie Bevels Dunn

This study aims to explore how teachers changed literature instruction in English language arts (ELA) classrooms following personal loss, and identifies factors influencing those…

Easter eggs and semiotic cues: embedded meaning as early adolescents engage in programming-as-writing

Julia Hagge

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which early adolescent programmers embed meaning in their digital media created within an online programming community called…

Reflections on writing and teaching: a study of five writing contest winners

Wendy R. Williams

English teachers who write have valuable expertise that can benefit students. Although there is a fair amount of research on teacher-writers, little is known about teachers’…

Bus riding leitmotifs: making multimodal meaning with elementary youth on a public school bus

Antero Garcia, Stephanie M. Robillard, Miroslav Suzara, Jorge E. Garcia

This study explores student sensemaking based on the creation and interpretation of sound on a public school bus, operating as a result of a desegregation settlement. To…