Framed in theories of social semiotics, this descriptive multiple case study examined six middle school teachers' use of gestures during one school year as they each taught two different subject areas: earth science, language arts, mathematics, and/or social studies. The data, which included field notes and photographs from 354 lessons and…

This study reports two stages of research into the discourses of poetry education in the United States from the early 20th to the early 21st centuries. The first is an original study that traces the history of discourses about teaching poetry, and the second is a coda or concluding analysis that raises questions about how history functions as a…

The purpose of this study was to examine how oral vocabulary instruction was enacted in kindergarten. Four days (12 hours) of instruction were observed in 55 classrooms in a range of socio-economic status schools. All instruction was coded for evidence of vocabulary instruction for a total of 660 hours of observation. Results revealed that…

This article examines two approaches to teaching content area literacy: a strategies approach focused on general practices of reading and writing and a disciplinary approach attuned to the particular discourses of particular domains. Basil Bernstein's theory of the pedagogic device is used to critique both approaches' assumptions about…

This meta-analysis examines the effectiveness of a group of instructional approaches (i.e., cooperative, collaborative, and peer tutoring) at improving literacy outcomes for English language learners. Main effects analyses of a sample of 28 experimental and quasi-experimental studies reveal that peer-mediation is more effective for ELLs than…

This paper examines why communicative language teaching (CLT) fails to improve student learning in certain contexts by assessing two adult educators' communicative and noncommunicative practices through qualitative case studies, interviews, and participant observations. Results show no inherent CLT problems that prevent teachers from grasping…

The aim of this article is to expand the dialogue about how contemporary scholarship on the intersections between youth, literacy, and popular culture might inform literacy teacher education. Specifically, this article is designed to (a) orient literacy teacher educators who may be somewhat unfamiliar with this particular line of scholarship to a…

Obstacles, and instructional responses to them, that emerged in two middle school science classes during a formative experiment investigating Internet Reciprocal Teaching (IRT), an instructional intervention aimed at increasing digital literacy on the Internet, are reported in this manuscript. Analysis of qualitative data revealed that IRT enabled…

We addressed whether the degree of structure of reading content delivery to the children or degree of professional development support for the teachers was related to kindergarten through second-grade students' 2-year reading growth in high-poverty, low-performing schools. There were four categories of data sources: (a) classroom,…

This mixed-methods study explored (a) the purposes for which teachers selected video clips of their own literacy teaching and assessment practices to share and discuss with peers, (b) how these purposes were related to the content of the discussions, and (c) what variables were related to teachers' generation of new ideas and future actions that…

This article provides micro analysis of one representative incident from a larger qualitative study to examine how third-grade bilingual students and their teacher negotiated academic disciplinary and popular culture discourses in a social studies unit on Jamestown and Pocahontas. Informed by discourse and linguistic analyses, this study explores…

One path to improving adolescents' literacy skills is to integrate reading and writing into the content areas in which such work occurs. Although argumentative writing has been found to help students understand historical content and transform information, scholars do not know the influence of specific task structures on students' writing or…

This article features a case study of the written and illustrative text produced by one Grade 7 student, Stefinia, and discusses the metaleptic transgressions evident in the book she created as the culminating activity of a research project. Stefinia was a participant in a classroom-based study that explored how developing students' knowledge of…

In this article, the author reports on what he found impressive in the evaluation results of the program Reading First (RF) in four states: Utah, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida. The author states that responding to these four exemplary state-level studies of Reading First evoked mixed feelings. He noticed three things: (1) the RF effect…

The effect of three approaches to revision instruction on 61 college students' revision behavior and writing quality was investigated for this article. Students wrote three 5-page papers and received one of three instructional approaches: Formal Peer Review (n = 19), Formal Self-Review (n = 20), or No Formal Review (n = 22). Formal Peer Review…