In a teaching context fraught with conflicts on religious and ethnic backgrounds, I decide as a teacher researcher to address these issues with Israeli-Arab middle school students in my EFL classroom. Picture books on religious diversity and minority issues are used as a springboard for providing spaces for students to discuss these issues orally,…

As an approach to literary study, critical literacy is not a widespread practice in New Zealand secondary schools. This article draws on a major project on teaching literature in the multicultural classroom that take place over two years in 2008-2009. In it we report on a case study where a Year 13 English teacher designed and tested a novel…

This paper reports on a qualitative teacher inquiry conducted in a tertiary, English-as-a-foreign-language classroom in Taiwan. The purpose of the study was, first, to implement a poststructuralist view of critical literacy that focuses not only on texts but also on the practice of reading as constructed and contested, and second, to examine the…

The study reported on here sought to better understand the development of writing talent from the perspectives of a group of gifted adolescent female writers. Recent shifts in how giftedness and talent are conceptualized has led to an increased focus on domain-specific abilities and the importance of understanding how specific talents can be…

Teachers of English experience significant pressure in attempting to meet the requirements of the national examination system, while also seeking to uphold their own ideological and philosophical perspectives on the value of poetry. Drawing on a mixed method study into the teaching of poetry at post-primary level in Ireland conducted between 2007…

Building on the work developed by Morrell (2003) on critical textual production, this paper provides a glimpse into a critical text produced by a student during a summer research seminar at a West Coast University. This paper highlights the process of critical textual production, the writing that resulted from this method and how a critical…

In this brief retrospective essay, the value of a particular kind of classroom talk is extolled--not the kind of talk that simply feeds back information, but rather talk that has the power to shape knowledge through participant engagement with a range of processes: hypothesising, exploration, debate and synthesis. This kind of talk is the…

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…

In "Language, the Learner and the School", Douglas Barnes recognised that intonation was important to classroom interaction but also acknowledged that his own research team did not choose to analyse it. This article presents instances of classroom talk about poetry and reflects on them using Barnes' concepts of pupil participation, exploratory…

This paper addresses the current resurgence of interest in classroom talk and its place in pedagogy; in particular the role of teachers in shaping students' learning through the design of classroom interactivity. The importance of teacher agency with respect to pedagogic design is highlighted in recent studies of pedagogy in the UK (Alexander,…

This essay focuses on the recent introduction by the Australian Federal Government of standardised literacy testing in all states across Australia (that is, the National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy, or NAPLAN), and explores the way this reform is mediating the work of English literacy educators in primary and secondary schools. We…

In this paper we suggest a practical, talk-based model for the successful pursuit of teaching science in primary classrooms (Loxley et al., 2010). This model is not only based on our own experience of teaching in primary schools, and of training teachers to do so, but is also based substantially on research on classroom talk, which has built upon…

In the light of increased interest in teachers' professional identities, this paper addresses the under-researched area of teachers' writing identities and examines the factors which influence how primary phase teachers are positioned and position themselves as teacher-writers in the literacy classroom. It draws on case studies of two…

Recent policy developments in England have, to some extent, relaxed the hold of external, high-stakes assessment on teachers of students in the early years of secondary education. In such a context, there is the opportunity for teachers to reassert the importance of teacher assessment as the most reliable means of judging a student's abilities. A…