What are adolescents choosing to read? This is an important question because of potential divergence between school students' reading interests and reading expectations in school. This article considers the findings from a study of the reading over one week in May 2002 of 707 school students aged between 11 and 15, undertaken in 30 schools in the…

What can listening to children's ideas about poetry teach us? This article considers ways in which exploring primary-aged students' perceptions of poetry can inform teachers' work with children. Using strategies from earlier studies in secondary schools, a small-scale project with Year 6 students revealed their complex and sometimes contradictory…

This article reports on ongoing work in initial teacher education (ITE) where student teachers have been required to observe and record children's play, to describe and analyse this, and to consider the pedagogical implications. They have been introduced to a theoretical background, which takes into account the increasingly multi-modal nature of…

This article explores the place of the class novel within the current primary curriculum. It begins with an overview of past and current thinking about reading aloud to older primary-age children. The discussion then moves on to describing research carried out with 43 primary postgraduate student teachers, which aimed to investigate the students'…

This paper concerns an approach to raising literacy standards which is rather different from the prevailing orthodoxy the Rhyme and Ritual project. The project is run by the Hamilton Reading Project, which comprises a series of initiatives funded by the Hamilton Trust, an educational charity, and implemented in fifteen primary schools in a large…

This article presents findings from a one-year study of several Bengali-speaking children aged 5-6 years, in their first year of the English school system. The investigation centres on exploration of the children's responses, principally to the visual text, of a selection of narrative picture books used in their school. The aim was to collect…

This article explores ways in which children's picture books form networks of relationships, and their implications for readers and classroom teachers. In this exploration, reading is seen to involve making connections within and beyond the text at hand. These connections, evoked differently across readers, shape readers' interpretations of text.…

This article asks what happens to the learning of young children when they work regularly with a professional visual artist in their school. Through Creative Partnerships, a national programme initiated in 2002 to bring creative professionals into schools across England, some school children have had the opportunity for sustained project work with…

This article describes the Literacy and Social Inclusion Project, a partnership between the National Literacy Trust and the Basic Skills Agency, which looked specifically at home and community approaches to literacy teaching. It presents a model for building parental skills and considers the policy implications of this initiative.

This paper considers the pioneering development of a community-focused literacy initiative that began in Derbyshire, a county in the middle of England. Read On-Write Away! (ROWA!) is viewed from the standpoint of its former director. The article describes the strategy in the context of national policy and other government initiatives in England,…

In 2003 the National Literacy Secretariat (NLS) of Canada, at that time a branch of the Department of Human Resources and Development Canada, decided to review its research function. This article discusses some of the questions the review raised for the field. Many of these issues are to do with the management of knowledge--what research gets…

The article describes the genesis of, rationale for and running of the Parent Empowerment for Family Literacy Project (PEFaL), a European-Union funded six-nation family literacy initiative that took place between 2001 and 2004. Whilst a number of features of the project are typical of family literacy programmes, some aspects of PEFaL are…

Different research on literacy demonstrates that the family has an important impact on literacy in general and it seems that there may be an inter-generational transfer of literacy level and reading habits within families. In order to compensate for lack of encouragement of reading at home, different initiatives have been developed involving work…

This paper uses aspects of "third space" theory to support the use of site-based classroom role play as a means of ensuring continuity of text construction between home and school. A hypothetical continuum of text construction between home and school is described, and it is suggested that schools wishing to support this continuum might consider…

In this article, the relationship between literacy practices and spatiality is explored in the context of family literacy. The article draws on fieldwork in family literacy classrooms as part of two evaluations in Croydon and Derbyshire of family learning provision. Methods of evaluation included classroom observations in rural and suburban…