Lesson transitions are important units for analysis not only for establishing the presence of group/pair work but also for examining the contextual conditions for small-group learning. Scholars have suggested that the "open" or "closed" contextual conditions set up through the teacher's use of language to introduce group/pair work influence the…

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…

A teacher's role was dramatically changed from that of an educator to that of a facilitator with the adoption of semi-scripted curriculums. This case study explores teachers' perception and implementation of a state's English Language Arts curriculum in first-grade classrooms. Four first-grade teachers from a large urban school district were…

This article builds on the growing research interest in complementary schooling in England and internationally but a field of study less well trodden in Scotland. It takes a socio-cultural view of literacy learning and demonstrates how in a Chinese complementary school in central Scotland, spaces are created for children of primary-school age to…

When people are ill, they want to know what is happening to them and how they can get better. Current health policies support patients' access to health information and encourage them to take part in decisions regarding their health. But little is known about how patients learn and the difficulties they may encounter in the process. This paper…

Literacies are always learned in particular social places and spaces, and the nature of a site shapes the experiences people have of learning literacies there. This paper considers the experiences of staff in two contrasting workplaces: an early years centre, and an adult education college. Both are educational workplaces, and staff are engaged in…

This paper uses a study of the photo-sharing website Flickr to examine new online spaces for writing. On this site, people write titles and descriptions for their photos, they annotate their photos with semantic tags, they provide profiles of themselves and they comment on other people's photos. In these activities, people are engaging in new…

Over a 13-month period, the Schome Park Programme operated the first "closed" (i.e. protected) Teen Second Life project in Europe. The project organised diverse educational events that centred on use of a virtual world and an associated asynchronous forum and wiki. Students and staff together exploited the affordances of the environment to develop…

This paper considers the policy environment of adult literacy as a space within which sites of learning are shaped and given value. It explores the interplay between international, national and local visions of what literacy is, who literacy learners are and what counts as learning, thereby linking broader social formations with local practices of…

Discussions of "game literacy" focus on the informal learning and literacies associated with games but seldom address the diversity in young people's gaming practices, and the highly differentiated technologies of digital gaming in use. We use available survey data to show how, in South Africa, income inequalities influence consumption patterns,…

In this article, we draw on our research on the digital portable library, eGranary, undertaken in a rural Ugandan village in 2008, to contribute to place-based studies of digital literacy. Our research project investigated the uptake of eGranary by students in the community, focusing on six secondary students who worked as library scholars in the…

Hollywood movies are popular in Uganda. This paper reports a study that investigated access to English-language Hollywood movies in Uganda, by way of an ethnographic audience study carried out in slum areas of the city of Kampala. The researchers visited and participated in the watching and reviewing of English-language movies in makeshift video…

Observing that place may be understood in a range of sometimes conflicting ways, the paper picks up on recent work within literacy studies on notions of place-making and locational disadvantage to argue for increasingly sophisticated and reflexive uses of place in the field, as a counterpoint to both increasing educational standardisation and…

In this study, we draw on three interrelated concepts, i.e. placed resources, multiliteracies and the carnivalesque, to understand how information and communication technology (ICT) resources are taken up within the context of a print-based journalism club. Our research participants attend an under-resourced girls' residential secondary school in…

Despite massive funding from the Australian government, the literacy achievement of Australian Indigenous children remains significantly lower than for non-Indigenous. With the aim of identifying innovative ways to improve Indigenous children's literacy achievement, this study explored the social practices surrounding everyday mobile phone use by…