Many children view favourite feature films repeatedly at home and develop understandings of them. This article discusses findings from a study which focused on the understandings that 9- and 10-year-old children showed about character in "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets." These findings are reported in terms of a framework appropriate for…

The literacy practices of many communities today show new ways of meaning making in the contemporary, technological and digital culture. A number of Malaysian adolescents belong to this culture. This pilot study reports the preliminary findings of a larger study aimed at describing the online activities of Malaysian adolescents. Fifty-four…

At the time of writing, primary English education is, once again, at a crossroads. Within the context of a continuing focus on underachievement in writing for key groups of learners and a large body of research, which suggests that classroom talk is a powerful means of improving children's success in all areas of the curriculum including writing,…

This article argues that digital games and school-based literacy practices have much more in common than is reported in the research literature. We describe the role digital game paratexts--ancillary print and multimodal texts about digital games--can play in connecting pupils' gaming literacy practices to "traditional" school-based literacies…

This paper documents an evaluation of children's written responses to a story telling package used in an intervention project set up by the National Association for the Teaching of English as part of the larger "Inspire Rotherham" literacy campaign. The brief was to provide a group of primary teachers with innovative and inspirational approaches…

Interviews with 216 Grades 4-8 teachers and observations in 21 classrooms show that computers are widely used to teach writing across Canada. Restricted access to computers plays a role in the frequency and types of interactions that students and teachers have with computers in writing classes. Equally influential are assumptions about writing…

This article is derived from a study of the use of Facebook as an educational resource by five dyslexic students at a sixth form college in north-west England. Through a project in which teacher-researcher and student-participants co-constructed a group Facebook page about the students' scaffolded research into dyslexia, the study examined the…

In this paper, I describe ongoing research exploring ways in which young teachers' digital lives unfold inside and outside classrooms. I first interviewed teachers in 2006, and identified three different routes into digital worlds: serious solitary self-taught, serious solitary school-taught and playful social. A number of teachers agreed to be…

Colour, a visual element of art and design, is a semiotic mode that is used strategically by sign-makers to communicate meaning. Understanding the meaning-making potential of colour can enhance students' understanding, appreciation, interpretation and composition of multimodal texts. This article features a case study of Anya, an 11-year-old…

Children's classroom talk and the connections between talk and text are current concerns for teachers. A deeper understanding of what child communication entails can ensure greater pedagogic support for the processes involved in text production. This article reports on a research project using multimodal discourse analysis to investigate…

Responding to "In defence of writing" by Havard Skaar, published in issue 43.1 of this journal (April 2009), the present article argues that (1) compared with text production "from scratch," producing texts through copy-and-paste requires a different type of--rather than less--semiotic work, and that (2) digitally produced writing may involve the…

This article relates a child's development in story writing and the progress that she made in achieving text cohesion, spelling development and ideation through the collaborative process. The case study investigates the integration of major aspects of writing development such as collaboration, the importance of peer interactions through social…

Samoan school children living in New Zealand were given disposable cameras and asked to photograph examples of the uses of reading and writing outside the school. Interviewed later, they explained their photographs including information about literacy in church and family. Rote learning and oral presentation of biblical texts that were read and…

Standard assessment tests have been part of the literacy practice in English primary schools for many years. While educators point to the dangers of "teaching to the test," politicians continue to believe that the best way of achieving accountability is by retaining league tables of these test results. Currently the curriculum is too readily…

This article looks at the way in which the changing visual environment affects education at two levels: in communication patterns and research methodologies. The research considers differences in the variance and quantity of types of visual media and their relationship to the written mode in the urban landscapes of Tokyo and London, using "Google…