In this article I consider the digital lives of a number of young teachers. Some are confident, competent movers in digital worlds, some are not. I wonder why, and look back at the teachers' digital histories to see whether ways in which they learned about digital worlds affects their lives now. I identify three different routes to learning about…

Although teachers are acutely aware of variance in students' literacy needs, many are unsure exactly how to support these needs in the dynamic classroom. This study reports on compelling evidence from Grade 2/3 classrooms in which teachers differentiated instruction in a variety of ways to benefit all students. In particular, teachers provided…

With the introduction of the National Literacy Strategy, England's primary school teachers were asked to replace "listening to children read"--a practice deeply embedded in UK pedagogy--with guided reading, a practice focused on interpretive and critical comprehension rather than accuracy and fluency. This small-scale research project addresses…

Effective writing is to some degree characterised by the ability to use complex grammatical structures. However, grammatical complexity is poorly defined in linguistics and related disciplines such as literacy. This empirical study examined the notion of grammatical complexity and its relevance to literacy. Complexity is multifaceted, so for…

In many accounts of school literacy teaching and learning, there are claims that young people's familiarity with digital texts (ICTs) could provide teachers with opportunities to plan exciting and innovative activities. It would seem, however, that despite intensive research and exemplary practices over the last 20 years, the infiltration of ICTs…

In Canada, as in other anglophone countries, classrooms are becoming more diverse as the number of English language learners (ELLs) increases. More and more teachers are faced with the task of meeting the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse students. In this article, I share excerpts of dialogue between ELL students, native…

Stories and poetry have long been considered a resource for the language and literacy development of bilingual children, particularly if they can work with texts in both mother tongue and English. This paper demonstrates that bilingual learning is also beneficial for second and third-generation children whose English is often stronger than their…

We review the Simple View of Reading (SVR) model and examine its nature, applicability and validity. We describe the SVR as an abstract framework for understanding the relationship between global linguistic comprehension and word-reading abilities in reading comprehension (RC). We argue that the SVR is neither a full theory of reading nor a…

The Rose Review into the teaching of early reading recommended that the conceptual framework incorporated into the National Literacy Strategy Framework for Teaching--the Searchlights model of reading and its development--should be replaced by the Simple View of Reading. In this paper, we demonstrate how these two frameworks relate to each other,…

Brain imaging offers a new technology for understanding the acquisition of reading by children. It can contribute novel evidence concerning the key mechanisms supporting reading, and the brain systems that are involved. The extensive neural architecture that develops to support efficient reading testifies to the complex developmental processes…

This paper reports the first part of a 2-year longitudinal study, which examined the impact of age of entry to school on the reading development of 60 summer-born boys during Key Stage One. The sample was drawn from 18 schools in six Local Education Authorities operating different admissions policies. Thirty-one had attended nursery part-time,…

Debates continue in public and in educational policy forums about the "basics" of literacy while many have not recognised that these basics may never be the same again. Rapid changes in digital communication provide facilities for reading and writing to be combined with various and often quite complex aspects of music, photography and film. At the…

In this paper I discuss how taking a particular literary theory--the implied reader--serves to offer a focus for the teacher's initial reading of a text and provides a formative assessment tool. Iser's Implied Reader theory is discussed, after which a picture book, "Where the Forest Meets the Sea" by Jeannie Baker, is analysed from this…

A recent review of handwriting research in "Literacy" concluded that current curricula of handwriting education focus too much on writing style and neatness and neglect the aspect of handwriting automaticity. This conclusion is supported by evidence in the field of graphonomic research, where a range of experiments have been used to investigate…

The aim of this study was to examine whether the current literacy programmes in European Union kindergarten curricula support and enhance young children's reading and writing development. This study investigated whether the kindergarten curricula of 10 European countries: Britain, Belgium, France, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal,…