Picture books are an important and accessible form of visual art for children because they offer, among other things, opportunities for making connections to personal experiences and to the values and beliefs of families and communities. This paper reports on the use of a picture book to promote Year 4 students' making of text-to-self…

This article explores and interrogates the common practice of asking students to write personal narratives within elementary English Language Arts classrooms, addressing some of the difficulties that may arise when students are required to share personal details. Using interview and focus-group data from a study of internationally adopted children…

This paper explores how students' talk in classrooms is influenced by a whole-school focus on lifting the quality, and the substantive nature, of classroom dialogue as an approach to improve student engagement, and to develop listening and speaking skills. Specifically, we show how designing and participating in whole-school professional…

Writing is a complex, recursive and difficult process that requires strategic decision-making across multiple domains (Graham, 2006; Pritchard & Honeycutt, 2006). Students are expected to use this process to communicate with a variety of audiences for a variety of purposes. Modelling and providing effective instruction is critical, especially…

Building on the principles of philosophical hermeneutics, Ricoeur (1984) used the concept of narrative to explain how individuals interpret their experiences and make sense of seemingly disconnected elements of life by turning them into the stories. Narrative identities represent the coming together of the stories individuals tell, as well as…

What is the journey of acquiring language? What is the journey of sharing it? These are the questions that compelled the hermeneutic phenomenological investigation (Gadamer, 1960/2004; van Manen, 1997) that led to this paper. Guided by the voice of Heidegger (1954/2008), I discovered the necessity of "un-learning to learn" in order to hear the…

This paper examines whether students involved in CLIL are able to learn content through the medium of L2 and simultaneously exhibit significant gains in L2 vocabulary knowledge. Two experiments were set up in two public primary schools. Two groups of 6th grade students participated in each experiment. The first group was taught three 80-minute…

In this paper, I focus on a prevalent and controversial practice in English instruction, namely corrective feedback or repair. While the pros and cons of this practice have been rigorously debated by language scholars for many years, the issue is mostly approached from a cognitive point of view with the focus being on the individual learner and…

This paper examines a blended learning context known as book raps where children read and respond to literary texts. In this particular e-literacy environment, readers discuss their opinions of a book under the guidance of a moderator known as a rap coordinator who provides stimulus questions known as rap points. The paper demonstrates how…

Digital video production in schools is often theorised, researched and written about in two ways: either as a part of media studies practice or as a technological innovation, bringing new, "creative", digital tools into the curriculum. Using frameworks for analysis derived from multimodality theory, new literacy studies and theories of embodied…

This article draws on data from research with six ten-year-old children investigating the role of film and media in developing understandings of narrative. I present an account of one of the children, Connor (his chosen pseudonym), whose experiences represent a telling case of the dissonance found between children's knowledge and experience of…

The data discussed in this paper is drawn from research conducted in a multilingual urban primary school in Johannesburg, South Africa, where the official language of instruction is English and the majority of learners are African language speakers, frequently with very limited English proficiency. The paper presents a case study of one child who…

This paper reports on a study investigating the use of digital texts in schools serving low and middle/upper socioeconomic communities. It draws on theoretical notions of rhizomes from the work of Deleuze and Guattari to explain the network of relations that are formed in classrooms, and that form the context for a set of patterns observed when…

This paper takes up the sea-faring metaphor at the centre of this special edition and asks what kinds of navigational tools (metalanguages) are necessary to steer English through the digital seas of contemporary communication. Much of this territory is yet to be mapped and the disciplinary "boat" is buffeted by contrary winds such as pressures for…

Maori are the indigenous people of New Zealand. Since British colonial settlement in the early 1800s, Maori children have been predominantly educated in an English-speaking system dominated by colonial governance. In this institution, Maori children have been constructed as deficient learners, primarily in relation to a colonial curriculum taught…